


The Thing from Another World

by SoloMoon



Series: Eleutherophobia [11]
Category: Animorphs (TV), Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence and Gore, F/M, Gen, Teenage-boy-typical levels of profanity, Tom Berenson POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-10-06 04:06:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 40,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10325243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoloMoon/pseuds/SoloMoon
Summary: From the point of view of the U.S. Military, Tom Berenson is an ideal candidate to act as temporary field commander and liaison for the Animorphs as they investigate a downed alien ship: he’s a law-abiding citizen, a legal adult, a morph-capable human who has a solid track record of catching murderers, and just about the only person for whom Jake Berenson has expressed open respect.  From the point of view of Tom Berenson, putting him in charge of these crazy teenagers while also dealing with a brand-new species of deadly alien is the stupidest decision the U.S. Military has ever made.





	1. Tough Neighborhood

**Author's Note:**

> Written to the sounds of [ "The Gulf War Song" by Moxy Fruvous.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2Y7HslyQXE)
> 
> Set about two months after "Total Recall" (fourteen months after the war ended), but these stories can be read in any order or alone. All you need to know from earlier works is that Tom survived the final battle and currently has a job as Eva's administrative assistant.

<So many species on this planet,> Temrash 114 said to himself. <So many balances and connections. Everything preying on everything else. Every power is checked by some other power. Every advantage is canceled by some disadvantage.>

<Yeah. Earth. It's a tough neighborhood.>

— _The Capture_ p. 156

 

“Remind me again what I’m doing here?” I said tiredly.

Jake didn’t answer.  He was staring intently out the window of the Army transport jeep, watching up ahead for whatever it was we’d been called out to look at.  Cassie glanced over at me long enough to give me a small shrug.

It was Marco who twisted around from the front seat of the Humvee to grin at me.  “Uncle Sam said jump, we said how high.”

“Yeah, okay, that explains you three,” I said.  “But I’m not even a member of the Teen Titans, so why did I get invited along on this little expedition?”

This time Marco turned all the way around, unbuckling his seat belt to kneel up on the seat and glare at me.  “Teen Titans?  We are _so_ the Avengers.”

“The Avengers are a group of educated well-funded adults with government sanctioning, day jobs, and actual uniforms,” I pointed out.  “The Teen Titans are a group of idiot kids in garish spandex.”

Marco opened his mouth to argue and then shut it again, conceding the point.

The truck hit a bump and Marco almost tumbled off the seat.  Jake tensed even further, which I didn’t think was possible.  He’d started out the trip drumming his fingers against the armrest until Cassie had given him a pointed look and he’d cut it out.  Now he was bouncing one leg in place, twitching any time there was a sudden noise like a six-year-old on a sugar high.

I was sitting very, very still.  We all dealt with the tension in different ways.

Marco kept squirming in his seat and demanding to know if we were “there yet.”  Cassie was watching the rest of us with uncomfortable closeness, and mostly keeping whatever it was she saw to herself.  I couldn’t tell if the guy the Army had sent to drive us to the crash site (and that was the sum total of the detail we’d gotten: it was a crash site) thought we were a bunch of immature idiots or was still too intimidated by the Animorphs to be judging anyone.  Then again, maybe he was just a fellow ex-host with the poker face to match.

Either way, he didn't say a word even as he pulled off the highway and onto a side road—and turned from there to a narrow dirt track.  The dirt road took us through the woods (Jake watched the tree tops closely the entire time as if expecting us to be attacked at any second) and past two different sets of guards with very large guns before finally pulling up in front of a large tent strung up in a rough clearing in the woods.

It was guarded by a bored-looking young man with a pistol on his belt.  The jeep pulled to a stop, and several more men in crew cuts and uniforms emerged.  Most of them were armed as well.

“Interesting,” Cassie murmured as we all climbed out.

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head fractionally, glancing at the group of men in uniform who were even now shaking hands with Jake.  Whatever else it was that she didn't want to say, I got that message loud and clear: she had noticed something, but she didn't trust the people who’d brought us here enough to mention it in front of them.  

 _Interesting_ indeed.

“Thank you for coming,” one of the Army guys said to me, moving down the line.  His handshake was rock-hard with callouses and felt like it was about half a degree shy of breaking every bone in my hand.  "Second Lieutenant Seth Clearwater."

“Um, hi,” I said.

“Seriously, though,” Marco interrupted, gesturing to me.  “How did he get invited along?”

“Captain Nasland felt it wouldn't be appropriate to send in a response team comprised entirely of individuals under the age of eighteen,” Lieutenant Clearwater said.  “Not without at least one legal adult along to supervise.”

“You’re telling me…?” I cocked a thumb at Jake.  “Am I his babysitter?”

The guy with the most uniform decorations—probably Captain Nasland—stepped forward to give me a stern once-over.  “There are regulations in place for a reason, son.  And since we don’t have anyone morph-capable in our unit…”  He shot a glare at Jake as if Jake was the one who’d written the laws about who could and couldn’t morph.  “You were the first person who was available.  You have a strong history of working with law enforcement, a clean legal record, and...”  He paused for a second.  “We have the utmost confidence in your abilities.”

In other words, he thought I could control Jake.  Which was adorable, really.  

“Since we’ve been hopelessly incompetent any time in the past we’ve tried to do something _without_ a legal adult along,” Cassie muttered.

“I understand you have to do this by the book,” Jake said.  There was a hint of irony in his tone, and I could guess why.  Right now they were behaving very cloak-and-dagger about _whatever_ had crashed in the woods that they needed us to look at.

“If you’re not comfortable with leading this expedition,” Captain Nasland told me, “the alien abduction expert we have coming in has some experience with child care, so you can always opt out.”

“ _Child_ care?” Marco squawked.

“I’m sure I can keep them from putting forks in wall sockets,” I said dryly.

Jake was wearing one of those long-suffering expressions our mom always got when she thought her kids were behaving like idiots but knew she’d only make the situation worse by saying anything.  “Can you please just show us what we’re here to _respond_ to?” he asked.

Captain Nasland nodded sharply.  “Of course, sir.  This way, please.  Do you understand that you are not to tell anyone else, human or otherwise, about what you’re going to see here?”

“We already signed the nondisclosure agreements in the car on the way over,” Cassie said.  “We understand.”

We all followed Captain Nasland through the huge tent where there were dozens of people running around looking at computing equipment that ran the whole range from PCs to yeerk technology scanners.  Most of the screens were showing numbers or squiggly lines that meant nothing to me, but there was one in the corner that showed a satellite readout of the entire area, with a large area in the middle marked in red: “No Fly Zone.  No Satellite Photography.”  There were also a lot of hastily-thrown drop cloths covering shapes of what looked like yeerk scanners and weapons, doubtless repurposed off downed Bug fighters.

As we walked through the room, most of the soldiers straightened up, either shooting glances at our little group or outright slipping into parade rest.  It was easy to forget, given how much time they spent bickering about which Nintendo console was the best and whether Trent Reznor was a better singer than Dexter Holland, but I was currently walking between the two most-decorated veterans in the history of the United States and just behind the girl projected to become the next U.N. ambassador to the nation.  If you actually counted their honorary titles—not that Jake ever did—then they were probably the three highest-ranked people in the room.  

Captain Nasland walked clear through the tent without stopping or looking around.  When he held open the cloth opening on the other side, Cassie whistled softly.

I understood why: there was an entire building through there.  It had plastic walls and a few temporary generators hooked up to the outside visible through its windows, but it also had a floor and ceiling and electricity.  If this was all a temporary installation, it was a very elaborate one.

And the tent, as Cassie had probably already guessed, was an illusion.  Designed to make this whole operation look more haphazard than it actually was from the outside.  

“Day before yesterday?” Cassie asked Jake in an undertone.

“Yesterday afternoon, maybe,” Jake whispered back.  “If they worked all night.  Since I’m guessing this is a priority, it’s probably a safe bet to say they did.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out what they were talking about: they were trying to determine when the crash had occurred, if the military had had time to put something like this structure in place.  The phone call that had summoned Jake and I to the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport where we’d met the military transport had made it sound as though the crash had arisen suddenly, at some point in the past hour, and as though Jake was the first call they’d made.

Captain Nasland gestured, holding open a second door, and we walked through one by one.  As we passed under the doorway it let out a cheerful little _beep_.  I flinched.  We’d just walked through a concealed Gleet BioFilter.

We walked down a long hallway, hung a left, and passed several more doors.  Jake was chewing his lip, gaze scanning over every surface and repeatedly peering through the translucent ceiling.  Probably trying to calculate how big the building was.

“And that’s another thing,” Marco said, as if picking up in the middle of a conversation.  “What _alien abduction expert_ are they calling?  How are we not experts in alien abductions already?  I’ve been abducted by yeerks, I’ve been abducted by helmacrons, I don’t know if that whole incident on Leeran counts as being abducted by andalites, but if it does—”

Captain Nasland pulled open the door to the outside, and Marco abruptly stopped talking.

Cassie became the first one to step into the clearing on the far side, but the rest of us weren’t far behind.

I kind of thought I’d seen it all by this point.  Assumed that the part of me left over from that kid who’d watched _Star Wars_ so many times our VHS tapes wore out was far too jaded to find a crashed alien ship at all impressive.

I was wrong.

The ship was lying on its side in the dirt, partially flattened by the impact but still more than large enough to loom over us.  Like a spinning top with a nearly hundred-foot diameter, it had come to rest on one rounded edge with the far end tilted toward the sky.  It was an eerie shade of silver-grey, reflective and distorting in a way that no Earth metal ever would be.

Once we were out in the open, it was obvious that the clearing we were standing in had not been a clearing before the impact.  Trees had exploded outward in every direction from the crash site as if there had been an enormous blast of force—one that had left the ship itself strangely untouched.

And then there was the fact that it was unmistakably a flying saucer.

Not just saucer-shaped.  Encircled by the same rows of multicolored lights the fighter pilots described in the old reports.  Atmosphere-scarred from where not too long ago it had been moving at incredible speeds just over the ground.  Equipped with tractor beams and a ramp that folded outward from the bottom like some old World War II battle ship.  It looked like a UFO straight out of a science fiction story in a way that the dozens of alien ships I’d actually been on never had.

In the low light of the forest and the temporary base's generators, the apparition towered over the lower structures around.  The edge far above our heads formed a curving ceiling; the far end had dug into the dirt and kicked up black-burned grass all around.  

“Then again,” Marco said, “Maybe you should’ve skipped the Animorphs and called Agent Scully instead.”  His voice was hushed.  He must have felt the same uneasy sense of simultaneous familiarity and wrongness that I did.  

“Agent Mulder,” Jake corrected absently.  He didn’t look away from the flying saucer.  “Scully’s the cynic who keeps ignoring the evidence of aliens in favor of sticking to her outdated superstitions.”

“Skrit Na,” Cassie said.

Jake finally looked away from the ship to shoot her a questioning glance.

Cassie gestured to the saucer.  “They’re the only species I know of that uses ships like this.  Most of the ones who make it to other worlds are either scavengers or scientists, looking to see without being seen themselves.  There was an incident that the U.N. had to deal with where Skrit Na tried to kidnap a hork-bajir and Toby called me to help the whole community get protection under the law.  I only know what was in the official report, which… wasn’t much.”

It was more than I knew.  I’d heard the name before—or, well, Essa 412 had heard the name before—and that was about it.

“So they might be hostile to American interests?” Captain Nasland said.

Marco shot him a withering look.  “If they know what American interests _are_ I’ll be impressed.”

We stared at the ship for another long moment.

“Judging from the satellite photography of the area, it crashed late yesterday morning.”  It was a different soldier who spoke this time.  He was shorter than average but had more than enough muscle mass to make up for it.  “Simon Grace,” he added.  “Staff Sergeant.”

Cassie was the one who took the initiative to shake his hand.  “Cassie Day.  Clueless civilian.”

“I’m sure that’s not true, ma’am,” the sergeant said, smiling shyly.  “You’ve, uh, certainly clocked more field time than I have.”

She laughed, glancing away.  “It’s not as though I’ve been trained or anything.”

"Still, alien ships have to be old hat for you," he said.

Cassie shrugged.  "Yeah, I've seen a few."

“Has anyone tried to talk to them yet?” I asked loudly, mostly for the purpose of interrupting them.  I could practically see Jake’s eyes turning green, and wanted to make sure he didn’t have time to say something he’d regret.

“We tried talking over the loudspeaker,” Sergeant Grace said.  “But…” He gave me an apologetic smile.

But they probably didn't have any equipment capable of producing thought speech.  Or a Galard-English translator.  And they probably knew enough to realize that without those things any attempt at communication was essentially useless.  There was even an off chance that the Skrit Na inside the ship could hear and understand spoken English, but just had no way of responding in any way humans could pick up.

“Our scanners initially reported two, maybe three complex life forms inside,” the sergeant continued.

That didn't necessarily tell us anything.  “Life form scanners are crappy and unreliable,” I pointed out.

At least, the ones that humans would have been able to inherit or reverse-engineer from yeerks would be.  The andalites had far better scanners, but they weren’t sharing.

Marco gave Sergeant Grace a sharp look.  “ _Initially_ reported two or three life forms?"

Sergeant Grace moistened his lips, glancing over to the door of the complex.  The officer standing there, a severe-looking woman with hard cheekbones and black hair caged in an unforgiving bun, frowned at him.  Finally, after looking Marco over carefully, she nodded once, and Sergeant Grace turned back around.

“That number dropped from three to two in the first ten minutes while we were trying to calibrate a reliable reading,” Sergeant Grace admitted.  “We wanted to try and overcome the design problems, so we kept taking readings over the next twelve hours..."

“And the number dropped from two to one to zero?” Marco said coldly.

Sergeant Grace's mouth flattened.  He glanced away.

Marco snorted.  “And meanwhile you guys, what?  Sat outside and banged your sensors against the wall and chalked it up to reading errors?  Twiddled your thumbs and debated whether to call your mommies and ask for permission to look inside?”

“At the time we have no reason to believe the pattern wasn’t from an equipment error.”  The dark-haired officer stepped forward from the doorway, her mouth set in a stiff frown.  “As Mr. Berenson said, life form scanners are notoriously subject to misreadings.”

“What _have_ you been doing for the past twelve hours, then?” I said.

The woman leveled a cold look at me, expression hard enough that I regretted my insolence.  Unlike everyone else here she was wearing a business suit, not a uniform.  Still, there was no doubt that she was the one with rank around here; she had the posture of a soldier and the military people kept glancing at her for approval.

“That’s classified,” Sergeant Grace said, after a long enough pause to get awkward.  

“Okay, since you've had a look around, what else do we know so far?” Jake asked, staring hard at the ship.

Sergeant Grace cleared his throat.  “Well, sir—“

Jake held up a hand, turning to give him a small smile.  “Sorry, but I wasn't actually talking to you.”

<Engine’s still on.>  The red-tailed hawk perched on a branch on the edge of the newly created clearing took off, fluttering in to land on top of the ship.  <Sounds like it’s working fine, from what little I know about how z-space engines are supposed to sound.>

“You’re saying that it probably didn’t crash because of a malfunction,” Cassie said.  If she was as surprised by Tobias’s presence as I was, she didn't show it.

Tobias flared his feathers, a human shrug in bird form.  <Not one that I can detect.  It looks like it’s just been sitting here idling since yesterday.  Lights are on, life support’s going.  No sign of damage that didn't come from the crash itself, and even that’s not much.>

“So maybe it was just a shitty landing?” I said.  There wasn’t much hope in my voice.  If something—or some _one_ —had caused everyone on board that ship to be suddenly unable to pilot it, and now was loose here on Earth...

Three detectable complex life forms, then two, then one, then zero.  That didn't sound like a parking accident.

<There’s a dead Na visible through the cockpit window,> Tobias said flatly.  <No other signs of life.  No sound of anyone moving around inside that I can hear.>

I gave up on that hope.  “So we’re back to assuming that everyone on board is dead.”

“Good of you to join us, by the way,” Marco said to Tobias.  So at least _everyone_ except me hadn’t been expecting him. 

<There was nothing on pay-per-view, and I was in the area anyway,> he said.

“Do you normally hang around No-One-to-Hear-You-Scream, Nevada?” Marco asked, squinting up at him.  “Because I for one am getting hives being this far from civilization.”

<So I was rubbernecking ‘cause I saw the ship go down,> Tobias admitted.  <Sue me.  I should have figured they’d bring you lot in.>

“What time?” Jake said.

Tobias looked over, fixing him with a laser stare.

“You said you saw it crash,” Cassie clarified.  “What time did it happen?”

<Oh, uh, a little before noon yesterday.  It’s been a tent city of twitchy dudes with guns around here ever since.>  Tobias shifted in place, looking down at the ship.  <No signs of life from inside the whole time.>

“Okay.  That’s bad, but…”  Jake walked away toward the side of the ship that was ground into the dirt, looking up at the still-sealed exit ramp.  “If it’s designed to travel through space it has to be airtight.  Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to breathe, right?”

“Your grasp of physics is just downright _uncanny_ , Big Jake,” Marco drawled.

Jake ignored him.  “So that means that at least nothing has gone in or come… oh.”

I walked quickly down to where he was standing.  Cassie and Marco weren’t far behind.  The hull of the ship had been split open on impact; the jagged crack was maybe two inches wide in the middle and a good four feet long.

“So now we’re all _really_ hoping that there wasn’t a killer virus on board,” I said dryly.

Marco shrugged.  “Nobody here has died yet."

“Incubation periods can last for weeks,” Cassie pointed out.  She was leaning toward the crack, examining the edges closely.

“Oh,” Jake said again.

Cassie was running her fingers along the jagged edges where the metal had broken.  She sniffed the air and grimaced.

“Careful,” I said.  “Assuming that’s standard atmosphere-vacuum coating, if you cut yourself on it you’ll get the _nastiest_ case of heavy metal poisoning.”  I’d seen it happen with more than one human-controller cut by a broken piece of Bug fighter: the injured limb would swell and blacken, and the host would be dead within days.  The yeerk, too, if the visser in charge at the time determined that the accident could have been prevented.

“Yeah.”  Cassie was peering into the hole now, but at least she wasn’t touching the broken edge anymore.

“Um, maybe we should all be standing back more?”  Jake was watching her nervously.

“If we do end up infected—either by the metal or by some virus—we can probably just morph it off.”  Cassie turned enough to give him a reassuring smile.  “And at least then we’d know that there is an infection, for the sake of everyone else here.”

“Okay, new theory,” I said.  “Sudden cabin depressurization caused the crash.  The crack came first, then everyone suffocated.  With no one to keep it in the air…” I gestured to the ship’s current state.

“Skrit Na can breathe Earth’s atmosphere.”

At the new voice Jake, Cassie, and Marco all spun around so quickly it was kinda hilarious to watch.  Cassie, still crouched next to the ship, almost fell over.

I turned around a lot more slowly.  Vice Principal Chapman showed no sign of having noticed everyone else’s reactions, but then that’s zombies for you.


	2. This is Earth (1)

"Now we stop playing games. You're not the Andalite fleet,” Prince Jake said. “And I'm not going to snap a salute and say 'yes, sir!' We deal as equals. Which, to be honest, is generous of us under the circumstances... This is Earth. This is a human planet. We are not the Hork-Bajir. We know how you 'rescued them.' As long as you're on Earth, you'll get along with us. Am I clear on that?"

— _The Arrival_ p. 45

 

“Skrit Na replenish their air supplies when they come to Earth.  Might be part of the reason they tend to make so many repeat trips.”  Chapman was watching us all with an expression that looked like boredom.

“What are you doing here?” Marco asked.

Chapman leaned against the wall of the temporary building, casual posture a sharp contrast to the soldiers’ formal precision.  “I was abducted by aliens years before children these days went and made it all the rage.”

“Wait, _really_?”  Marco frowned.  “What happened?”

Chapman gave half a shrug before letting his shoulder drop.  “Skrit Na abducted us from Earth, andalites took us from the Skrit Na, taxxons took us from the andalites, yeerks took us from the taxxons, and I can only assume the Ellimists took us from the yeerks.”

We all waited for him to finish the story for a few seconds before figuring out he wasn’t going to.

“How did you escape?”  Cassie became the first one to ask.

“No clue,” he said.  “Last I knew we were all getting sucked straight to hell inside a black hole, and then I woke up back here.”

<Why were andalites abducting people in the first place?> Tobias asked.

Another half-shrug.  “Never did get a straight answer from your old man on that one.”

<Wait, _what_? >

“Sorry, but can we talk about this later?” Jake said.  “Right now, we might all be breathing in a deadly virus, so I feel like that should probably take priority.”  He waved a hand at the downed ship.

“If it’s too late to keep the pathogen contained anyway, we should probably go on board and check it out,” Cassie said.

“Uh-huh.  Captain Nasland?” Jake called.

The Captain broke off from the small huddle of other soldiers he’d been talking to.  “General Berenson?”

Marco snickered.

“I’m going to need to borrow the nearest long-range communications array you have access to,” Jake said.

Captain Nasland shifted in place.  “May I ask why, sir?”

“I need to get ahold of Prince Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill.  He’s in charge of the _Intrepid_ , and he’s probably too far away to do more than talk us through this operation, but he probably has a better idea about how we should approach an unfamiliar alien species than I do.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Captain Nasland said.  There was no “sir” this time, and his smile had taken on a nervous edge.

“And I’m afraid that I have to insist.”  Jake was smiling too.  Or at least his lips were pressed back against his teeth, eyes narrowing at the corners.  

“Even if we could contact the andalite fleet any time we felt like it with any old personal message—which we can’t—there are more than enough complicating factors in this situation already without involving _another_ alien intelligence.”  Captain Nasland no longer looked nervous.  Now he looked like he was gearing up for a fight.

Jake’s expression might have been calm, but his shoulders were tight with tension.  “Why can’t you have anyone else knowing what’s going on here, Captain?”

Everyone was watching the two of them, and we had all gone very still.  I could practically feel the air getting thicker with nervous anticipation.

I got it: the request to contact Ax had been a test.  And Captain Nasland had just failed.

"Informing all of you about this incident is already enough of a breach of protocol," Captain Nasland said through his teeth.  "If you're not happy with the way that we do things, then I can bar you from this mission at any time—"

"Sounds good to me," Jake said coolly.  "I've already missed the new episode of _Survivor_ , but if you let us go now I can still catch _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_."

I was pretty sure he'd never watched either of those shows in his life, but of course that wasn't the point.  He'd just won this round of the pissing contest, thanks to the suggestion that he had magnanimously agreed to take time out of his important life and come down here to help out the poor clueless little captain.

Captain Nasland’s jaw was clenched so tightly I could practically hear his teeth grinding together.  I wasn’t sure I could get over there fast enough if he actually did take a swing at Jake, but I could most definitely hit back if it came to that.

“Don’t be silly, Jake,” Marco said brightly.  “Of _course_ they can’t let the andalites know about the crash.  That’s a scavenger ship probably just chock full of all sorts of brand sparkly new toys from all over the galaxy, and it just landed in their laps.  They want to keep it all to themselves.  Can’t have the andalites swooping in and taking it all—they’d just evoke Seerow’s Kindness and our own military would be left with nothing to show for it.”

Most of the soldiers within earshot were suddenly fascinated by their communications equipment.  I was guessing Marco had hit the nail on the head.

“It’s understandable, given the andalites’ tendency to want to _protect_ humans and keep all their toys to themselves,” Cassie said, much more gently.  She stepped up to his side, giving Captain Nasland a placating smile.  “We’re suddenly outgunned by dozens of other species.  Makes sense that they’d want to take advantage of this opportunity to catch up.”

She wasn’t really agreeing with them.  She was smoothing ruffled feathers.  Might even have been setting herself up to play good cop to Marco’s bad cop, if it came to that.

“All right, then.”  Jake turned away dismissively.  “Let’s just do what we came here to do.”

Captain Nasland’s expression was tight with anger, posture stiff and face very red.  He clearly hadn’t expected this much impudence from a group of teenagers.

“Should we start trying to open the hatch, sir?” Sergeant Grace suggested, voice small.  I wasn’t sure which of them he was talking to.

“Nah, we should go in first as flies,” Marco said.  “We’ve already got a nice little entrance—“  He pointed at the crack Jake had found.  “And if there’s a velociraptor or something running around loose in there then there’s no point in letting it out until we know.”

“Velociraptor?” Jake said.

“Cockroach,” Cassie said at almost the same time. 

<On it.>  Tobias took off.

“I don’t know, man.”  Marco grinned at Jake.  “It was the first thing that came to mind.  And it scares me a hell of a lot less than anything that might _actually_ be running around in there.”

“Yeah, good idea,” Jake said to Cassie.  “Roaches are a lot harder to kill, and since we don’t know what we’re getting into…”

“Well,” I said, “In that case—”

Tobias swooped low enough to drop a squirming cockroach into my hand.  <Way ahead of you, man.>

“Gee, thanks.”  I’d been about to volunteer to sit the first part of the little expedition out.  Now I was just fighting the urge to drop the disgusting, writhing _thing_ onto the ground and go wash my hands six or seven times.  The roach battered wildly against the cage of my fingers, wings opening and closing and legs scrabbling against my skin.

“Couldn’t go on this field trip without our designated over-eighteen chaperone along,” Marco said cheerfully, having guessed what I was thinking.

“Don’t worry, it’s not as gross as you expect,” Cassie said.

“It’s grosser,” Marco added.

I sighed and started to concentrate on the roach DNA.  As soon as I felt it go limp I dropped it on the ground.  Since I knew there was no way I was going to complete the morph if I had time to talk myself out of it—or if I had to watch any of the others go through with it—I closed my eyes and started to concentrate on the roach right away.

It was probably good I couldn’t see any of the others.  The feeling of my bones liquefying and giant antennae sprouting out of my head was more than disturbing enough.  My skin itched all over, and I did _not_ want to know what caused that sensation.  

“Make sure the prey instincts don’t overwhelm you,” Jake said.

And then my human ears disappeared.  I could feel myself falling toward the ground, wings splitting off from my skin and arms breaking into fragmented front legs.  At some point I realized I could see again, but that I was looking at a blade of grass taller than I was.

It was around then that the roach brain kicked in.  I could feel it nattering at me to get out of the light, to find somewhere more protected, but I fought back and managed not to move.  There was something disturbingly like being a yeerk trying to control a host in there, but I tried not to think about that too much.

I glanced around, antennae waving automatically.  There were four other roaches surrounding me in a loose semicircle in the grass. 

<Everyone all good?> Jake asked.

I tried not to bristle.  I knew that I was the only one he was actually worried about.  <Sure,> I said tightly.  <Peachy keen.  How do we tell which direction the ship is?>

<Don’t go toward the light,> Tobias said.

If I’d been physically capable of rolling my eyes, I would have.

<He means that if you allow the roach brain to take you toward the nearest dark enclosed space, we should get right there,> Cassie filled in.

The roach brain needed no more encouraging.  Before I’d even made a decision to give in I was already powering my tiny legs through the grass.  The speed was startling—the roach was dodging huge blades of grass faster than my human mind could register what they were.

Some part of me wanted to pick my way carefully, sedately across the ground, not power tiny legs at speeds faster than thought in a mad scramble for cover.  But I let the roach go.  It knew what it was doing.

There was a dark shape up ahead, one the roach was only too happy to seek out.  It was something incomprehensibly huge, blocking the sun.  Skrit Na saucer.  Or so I hoped.

I almost ran straight under it before I realized what I was doing.  The roach wanted to stay low.  It knew that the best way to avoid being spotted was to keep to the ground, but I had to get inside.

The dark grey surface looked easy enough to climb—at least, to the roach it did.  Just a matter of grabbing on with those tiny feet and—

I slipped off.  Landed on my back.

For a panicked second I flailed my little legs in the air.  There was nothing to grab onto.  But then one tiny foot found the surface of a plant stem, used it to push off.  I tilted, opening my wings part way to roll upright…

Wings.  Duh.

The roach didn’t like flying, but it was perfectly capable of doing so.

<Anyone else having trouble getting up the side of the ship?> Marco asked.

<Don’t climb, fly,> I said, a little smug that I’d been the first one to figure that out.  Even as I said it I fired off the roach’s wings.  The trick was not to think about it too much.

Flying as a roach was not at all like flying as a bird.  It was not automatic, or effortless.  It was like being a little kid trying to swim for the first time—a lot of frantic flailing and constant risk of letting go too much and falling out of the sky.  The roach body lurched drunkenly through the air, aiming only clumsily at the ship.  Able to fly it might have been, but aerodynamic it was not.

<Roaches can _fly_? >  Marco sounded disgusted.  <As soon as we get out of here I am having my entire house fumigated.  And then vacuum-sealed.>

<How are you still freaked out by roaches while you _are_ one?> I asked.

<Trust me, if you think too much about it you’ll know what I mean,> Marco said darkly.

He was right—if I spent too much time considering the reality of what we were doing right now I’d probably start screaming—but fortunately I had better things to concentrate on.  Like trying to land on that seam in the ship’s metal.  It was more than big enough for a cockroach to fit in, but flying was hard.  My wings were already aching from the strain after just a few seconds, and if I timed this wrong…

I folded my wings to my body, dropping down.  I landed on the edge of the break in the metal.  The other edge of the crack was less than an inch overhead, which was more than enough room for the roach.

<This is the stupidest configuration of wings _ever_ ,> Tobias grumbled.  <Why the hell hasn’t evolution gotten rid of these things yet?  They’re practically—augh!>

I could see a roach hit the side of the ship, bounce off, and drop to the ground.  I was guessing that was Tobias.

<Practically flying blind,> he finished.

There were two other roaches that I could see resting in the little crack.  A second later a third one landed between the torn edges of the metal, and then a fourth.

<Okay, everyone here?> Jake asked.

<Either that or we accidentally picked up a real cockroach along the way,> Marco suggested.

Mentally I shuddered.  That was a hell of a thought.  

He was right about the freakiness of it all.  Even knowing who everyone was, there was still a small part of my brain that was registering the others’ rapidly-moving mouthparts and giant antennae and cringing from the sight.  I was faintly nauseated by the extreme close-ups I was getting of roach faces, and knowing that I was a roach myself made it worse, not better.

<Judging from the air currents, rest of the ship’s this way,> Tobias said, thankfully distracting me.

The hull was narrower than I expected—or the roach just moved faster—and we popped out the other side of the crack in a matter of seconds.  The space beyond was brightly lit enough to make the roach nervous, but that meant we had an easier time looking around.

Everyone split off to run different directions over the walls and floor.  I couldn’t make sense of much of what the roach was seeing.  There was a wall, and tiling on the floor, and some objects in the distance, but if the ship was filled with poisonous green mist or zombie Skrit I couldn’t tell.

<Uh, guys?>  Jake’s thought-speak voice was oddly tense.  <I think we’re okay to demorph.>

<What makes you say that?> Cassie asked.

<I don’t think it was a virus that killed everything on board,> Jake said grimly.

I didn’t need any more convincing.  Immediately I focused on being wonderful and human and only having two legs.  I rose up from the ground, surrounded by equally gross growing blobs of flesh on all sides.  

The first thing I saw when I had human eyes again was the dead alien.

It was lying unmoving on its back, enormous black eyes clouded over.  It was sort of cute-looking, like a tiny human with a huge almond-shaped head and grey skin.  There was no question about what had killed it: the shredder was still clutched in one of its hands and the hole in its head was clearly visible from where we stood.

Beyond it lay another dead alien of the same type—or, well, half of one.  Judging from the angle, that one had been cut down from the same shredder in its dead companion’s hand.  The only other life forms we could see from here were three giant cocoon-like structures, lying tangled together on the deck.  All three had clear shredder holes cut through them.

Jake was still standing over the body.  I could see a set of tiny roach tracks trailing through the dark green blood on the deck, and grimaced in sympathy.  I didn't want to imagine what _that_ scene had looked like in extreme close-up.

“Oookay,” Marco said.  “Now I’m thinking less Scully and Mulder, more Nancy Drew.”

<The Mystery of the Murder-Suicide in the Alien Spaceship?> Tobias suggested.

“I guess it’s safe to open the door, then,” Jake said.  He squinted at the instrument panel next to the ramp.

“Pretty sure it’s that one,” I told him, pointing to a button on the end.  “That squiggly blue symbol is the universal equivalent of an Exit sign.”

He pressed it.  We all jumped when the ship made a loud grinding noise.  Marco muttered something about self-destruct buttons that proved he had more sci-fi geekery than common sense.

There was a loud _click_ and a section of floor slowly sank into a ramp to the outside.  The ship filled with brilliant sunlight through the open hatch and the door lowered all the way to the ground, revealing a whole crowd of soldiers who were watching us with no small amount of apprehension.

“Take us to your leader,” Marco deadpanned.

Jake rolled his eyes indulgently.  “If we can get you to the bridge, do you have any idea how to access the computer records?” He’d turned his focus onto Chapman, standing a few feet to the left of the cluster of Army guys.

Chapman shrugged.  “I can try.”

“Okay, then probably everyone else should just stay out here for now.”  Jake smiled apologetically at Captain Nasland, who gave him a narrow look.

I turned to look around the ship as they continued to discuss.  The place looked like a magician’s shop from an old movie, every spare corner and area of floor piled with junk.  Directly behind me there was a storage disk with andalite writing on it on the floor, which could have useful information about the crash—assuming we could find a reader compatible with that thing, which I wasn’t hopeful would actually happen.  I carefully stepped over what looked like a spilled pile of sticky orange ball-bearings and walked around a cracked lava lamp, moving toward those damaged cocoons.  If there were any more signs of life (or death, for that matter) in this room, they should be where the crap was piled most thickly.

My hip bumped a container that sloshed like it was full of liquid.  I glanced down—and recoiled in horror.

“What is it?” Jake said sharply.

I breathed in slowly, my heart still racing.  “Sorry.  Just... startled.”

There were four dead yeerks floating in the pale-blue liquid in the basin.  There was no clear sign of what had killed them, and the liquid was opaque enough that I couldn’t tell if there were any living ones under the surface.

The others—no soldiers had joined us, so Captain Nasland had clearly lost the argument—picked their way through the junk until they were all crowded around the basin.

“Okay, new theory,” Marco said.  “One of these...”  He kicked the basin and the yeerks sloshed nauseatingly.  “Crawled in that little grey dude over there...”  He gestured to the dead alien by the door.  “And killed everything in sight.  Then the little grey dude got back control long enough to...”  He formed his fingers into the shape of a gun and pressed it against his temple.  “Pow.”

Chapman shook his head.  “Skrit Na are a Class One species.”

“Really?”  I glanced over at the dead alien again.  It looked like it would have a central brain from the outside—What else would be in that oversized skull?—but I’d take his word for it.

<Class One?> Tobias asked.

“Unfit for infestation,” I explained absently, turning away from the dead yeerks.  “No central nervous system.”

“Yeerks classify different species on the basis of how easy they are to enslave?” Marco asked, disgusted.

“Humans classify different species on the basis of how edible they are,” Cassie pointed out.

“Yeah, but...”

“How’d the yeerks die?” Jake asked.  “Could it have been the same germ or whatever that drove that Na crazy?”

“That’s assuming it was crazy,” Marco muttered darkly.

Chapman laughed suddenly.

The others turned to look at him.

"Oh, what, I'm the only one who loves the idea of yeerks being killed by a hostile parasite?" he said.

"Kind of depends on whether it's going to kill all of us next," Marco said.

“They suffocated, more likely,” I said, crouching to examine a flat glowing object that leaned up against the far wall.  Mostly I needed an excuse to keep from looking at those sludgy grey bodies, those probing antennae...  “That’s not kandrona, or at least it doesn’t look like kandrona.  Yeerks’re like goldfish—they need to be swimming in a pretty delicate mix of chemicals or eventually they go gills-up.”  I poked the glowing thing and it started emitting a barely-audible hum.  “Even if they could breathe it, they might’ve still starved if they’ve been in there for more than three days.”

“That’d explain the cannibalism,” Chapman said.

I slowly turned back around.

“The _what_?”  Jake sounded like he regretted the question even as he was voicing it.

Chapman picked up one of the yeerks.  My gaze flinched away, my stomach churning.  It was dead, I reminded myself.  Dead.  Not moving.  Couldn’t hurt anyone.

The knowledge wasn’t enough to stop my skin from crawling.

“This one’s got holes in it,” Chapman said.  “From where this one...”  He dropped that yeerk with a sickening _plop_ and picked up a different one.  “Had its mouthparts latched on.  Probably sucking its guts out.”

“Can yeerks even get kandrona that way?” I asked, thrown.  I’d always assumed that getting their energy from sunlight the way they did meant they could only “eat” by photosynthesizing like plants instead of physically devouring other organisms the way Earth animals did.

“Yes.”  There was something dark and angry in Cassie’s voice.  “They can.  Remind us to tell you about Esplin nine-four-six-six's twin some time.”

<So the yeerks could’ve theoretically died _after_ the crash, > Tobias pointed out.  <If the ship’s only been in atmosphere for a few days, including the time it’s spent sitting here since yesterday morning...  The military sitting around waiting for whoever’s permission to send someone in could have caused at least those deaths.>

“Ladies and gentlemen, your hard-earned tax dollars at work,” Marco said dryly.

Personally I didn’t give a crap one way or another when or how a couple yeerks had died, except for the nasty little part of me that hoped it had been painful.

<What’s that?>  Tobias hopped down to a spot next to the dead alien we’d first seen.

Marco crouched next to him, lifting an object like a silvery pearl from next to the body.  “Z-space transponder, right?” he said, glancing at Chapman.  “Specifically for sending distress beacons?”

“You mean like the one you broke into my house to steal from Iniss two-two-six’s communicator?”  Chapman raised his eyebrows.

“Yep,” Marco said, unapologetic.

“Why didn’t you just sneak one out of of my room?” I asked.

There was a long pause.  All four Animorphs exchanged glances with each other.  Cassie shrugged.

“So we didn't think of that,” Jake said at last.  "No one ever accused us of being tactical geniuses."

“Oh, trust me, plenty of people have.”  I grinned.  “Clearly they’re not paying enough attention to Marco’s account of how you handled that Zone 91 nonsense.”

“Seriously?” Jake said, glancing at Marco.  “Did you put _everything_ in your memoir?”

“I didn’t say a word about the Hanson incident, thank you very much.”  Marco drew himself up, all righteous indignation.

< _The Gorilla Speaks_ ,> Tobias drawled, <about absolutely everything.>

“ _Anyway_.”  Jake took a deep breath.  “Distress beacon.  Is it on?”

“Does it matter?  Clearly no one was listening,” Chapman said.

“Yeah, but...”  Jake was frowning, looking around.  “The alien tried to call for help, but it also shot everyone?”  He glanced at Cassie as if hoping she’d have a clue.

“Maybe this Na wasn’t the aggressor,” she said quietly, gesturing to the one still holding the shredder.  “Maybe that one was.”  She pointed at the Na that had been cut in half.  “Maybe the last killing was self-defense, and then...”

We were all looking at her now.

“And then maybe the last Na knew there wasn’t any hope in trying to work a ship this complex in z-space alone.”  She looked down at the body.  “Maybe the ship was already damaged, and it knew everyone else was dead.  Maybe the crash is this far from civilization deliberately, because it didn’t want to hurt anyone on the ground.  Maybe...”  She shook her head.  “I don’t know, I’m just guessing here.”

“Okay, let’s work off that guess, then,” Jake said.

Leaving that particular macabre mystery be for the moment, we started picking our way deeper into the ship.  Most of the junk we passed was reasonably well-organized once we got away from the chaos of the main entranceway, which I was starting to guess had been tastefully decorated with some of the Skrit Na’s favorite pieces before this cruise had come to an abrupt end.  Maybe the basin of yeerks really had been like a bowl of goldfish.  Who knew?

“Nobody touch anything else until we have a better idea what might have made whichever Na want to kill everything.”  Jake said it as a suggestion, but no one contradicted him.

The main part of the saucer was cut through by a long corridor with dozens of doors branching off either side.  The hallways of the ship were low and narrow, designed to accommodate bodies smaller than those of human beings.   Jake and I both had to crouch awkwardly to avoid hitting our heads on the ceiling, and even Marco almost walked into a support beam before he ducked out of the way.  Tobias gave up on fluttering in restless circles—I’d been a bird of prey enough to guess how claustrophobic he had to be feeling—and landed lightly on Cassie’s shoulder, riding with her as we walked.

The floors were all at a slant from the way that the ship was resting.  Evidently the artificial gravity had failed, either in the same event that had caused the crash or in the crash itself.

“Do you know which way the bridge might be?” Cassie asked Chapman.

He gave her half a shrug.  His slouching walk, inflectionless way of talking, and tendency to prop himself up against vertical surfaces as if standing was too much effort all gave him the air of a sullen teenager who had woken up one day to find himself in a middle-aged body.

“Can you take an educated guess?” Cassie said patiently.

“Probably near the viewports.”  He jerked his head toward the ship’s current uphill direction.

“Okay, might as well try it.”  Jake opened a door in that direction at random.

He had to jump out of the way hastily as what appeared to be hundreds of pounds of some kind of grain came sliding out into the hallway.  The little seeds slipped past our ankles harmlessly, pooling against the far wall.  A rich scent, something like one of my dad’s fancy herbal teas but earthier, filled the enclosed space around us. 

<What the hell?> Tobias asked.

“Food?” Cassie suggested.  “Or fuel maybe?”

“It could be decorative for all we know,” I said, wading out of the mess.  “Or flammable.”

“Or we just walked into a booby trap, breathed poison, and we’re all going to die,” Marco said cheerfully.

“We’ll worry about it later,” Jake said.  “Or we’ll quietly succumb to the poison and die.  Either way, we should keep going.”

A little more cautious about potential spills now, he opened the next door only a couple inches.  He peered inside and shrugged.  “Empty, but also a dead end.”  He shut it carefully and opened another one.

Marco raised his eyebrows.  “Did it look like it used to hold a facehugger alien that is now scuttling around loose on the rest of the ship?”

So he’d also noticed that Jake had just lied.  Interesting.

“Thank you so very much for putting _that_ image in all our heads,” Jake muttered.  He continued on to the next door.

That one, when opened, actually did lead to another long narrow hallway, one that was even heading in the right direction.

Jake shrugged.  “Might as well—”

<Shhhhh!> Tobias said suddenly.

Everyone fell silent, but I couldn’t tell what he was listening to.  All I could hear in the sudden stillness was our breathing, which sounded very loud.

“What is it?” Cassie asked at last in a whisper.

<I think the engines are—>

The floor shuddered under our feet.  The hallway lights flickered off, and then back on.

We all froze for a long second.

I could hear the engines now.  At least, I assumed that that was the source of the faint vibrating growl emanating through the hallways.  It was not-quite audible, like the bass at a rock concert that exists more in the pounding of your body than the actual sound in your ears.  The sound was only noticeable now because it was becoming unsteady.

The lights went off again, and stayed off.  My eyes gradually adjusted to the much lower lighting, until I could just barely make out Marco standing a few inches away from me and a vague shape beyond him that was probably Chapman.  The only source of illumination was a dull pale-grey glow from the far end of the hallway that Jake had just opened the door onto.  Some combination of the tilt of the floor and the lowness of the ceiling made it impossible to tell what the source of the light was.

I startled when the lights flicked back on.  The engine noise faded again.

“So,” Jake drawled, and I jumped.  “I’m guessing this thing is starting to run out of gas?”

“We need Ax here to make a possibly-sarcastic possibly-literal comment about how this thing doesn’t actually run on gasoline,” Marco said.  He, at least, sounded as nervous as I felt.  Jake sounded like he was commenting on the weather in the middle of a walk downtown.

“Cassie,” Jake said, still totally casual.  “Might make sense for you to go wolf.  Just so we have an extra set of senses to find our way around in the dark.”

And someone in battle morph, in case of attack.  Someone who happened to have the least vulnerable lag time between one shape and another.

So he was nervous.  That was comforting to know.

Through some combination of amazing balance and estreen-skills, Cassie completed the morph without Tobias having to take off.  When she was done, the two of them together looked like some kind of tacky real-life Park Service advertisement.

There was no discussion on the subject, but she became the first one to walk down the hallway toward the bridge.  Our advance guard.  In case of...

In case of velociraptors, as Marco had said.  The remoteness of the possibility made it less nerve-wracking to consider.

Cassie’s nails sounded very loud on the slick metal floor as she walked.  The lights flickered again, and we all tensed and then collectively pretended we hadn’t.  We passed two more closed doors, but no one bothered to open them.  A third was hanging open; I glanced inside but couldn’t see anything but dim shadows.

“What is it?” Jake asked.  Cassie was bending down to sniff along the floor.

<Humans,> she said.  <Not us.  It’s all mixed up with like eight other alien scents the wolf can’t make anything of, but I think there’s something off...>

“Off?  How?”

<Human _and_ alien.  In the same scent. >

“Like a human-controller?” Marco suggested.

<No, not exactly, but—>

The lights went off again.  And this time they didn’t come back on.  The subdermal growl of the engines chugged for only a few more seconds before it cut off entirely.  

The silence left behind was very loud.  It was in this brand-new quiet we could hear it: somewhere deeper inside the halls of the ship, a baby had started to cry.


	3. The Very Best of Humanity

War is obscene, the worst thing humans do. But warriors, the individual men, are the very best of humanity. Not because they are willing to kill. But because they are willing to risk death, to sacrifice themselves for others.

—Rachel, _Elfangor’s Secret_ p. 204

 

“It’s coming from that way!” Marco said, shoving past me down a hallway to our right.

“Hang on!”  Jake caught his arm.  “We don’t know for sure if it’s a trap or—”

<If it is we’ll deal with it.>  Tobias was already flying away from him down the corridor Marco had indicated.

“But—”  Jake gave up on protesting and ran after him.

Cassie was being far more systematic, sniffing along the floor and checking every doorway.  The ship was so dark now that I lost sight of all four of them in a matter of seconds.

I took a deep breath—this place was a goddamn maze, and I wasn’t even sure which doorway to go through to get back to the main hatch, much less if I’d be able to find it in the dark—but followed them. 

“It’s survived this long,” Chapman muttered behind me, like he thought we were all being melodramatic.  “Probably be fine for another few minutes.”

“Unless they had it on some kind of life support that just switched off when the engines died,” I pointed out.

Marco ducked out of the room he’d been searching, squinting at me through the dimness.  “You’re assuming it’s not human.”

I shrugged, even though he probably couldn’t see me.

“Lotta little green men in the universe,” Chapman said coolly.  “Most of whom have proven perfectly willing to rob, enslave, or eat humans.”

Our voices sounded way too loud in the narrow space, when it was impossible to see far enough in either direction down the hallway to tell if anything was coming.  The noise—it still sounded like a baby’s cry to me, but it was also far enough away and echoing enough that I wasn’t certain—continued in spurts and stops.

I pushed open another door, and the sound was suddenly much louder.  Immediate.  I froze, not entering the room.

It wasn’t a baby crying.  The sound was a little too high-pitched, a little too regular.  My skin was chilled all over, goosebumps rising down my arms.

Whatever was making that noise, it was maybe five feet away from me in the darkness.  It could probably see me, but I couldn’t see a thing.

Something brushed my arm, and I whipped around.

“Sorry,” Jake whispered.  He held up an object that I had to squint at in the low grey light.

It was, absurdly, a tap light.  He pushed the top in to turn it on—I flinched at the sudden brightness—and directed the beam into the room.

The room beyond was not much bigger than a walk-in closet, and it was almost empty.  There were several thick black tubes tangled together in the corner near a second door, a spilled-open steamer trunk of weapons that contained everything from shredders to battle axes, and a single milk crate that contained the source of the noise.

The alien inside was fuzzy and dark grey, with round black eyes like drops of oil.  The distressed noise it was making probably came from the fact that its milk crate had caved in halfway in the crash, leaving it trapped helplessly between the floor and a low tangle of plastic.

I gasped out a laugh.  I'd been watching too many horror movies, apparently.  Because if that was our mystery killer, then I was pretty sure any one of us would be able to take it in a fight.

“Aww, poor thing,” Marco said from behind me.

“Yeah,” Jake said warily.  “But why does it sound like a baby?"

Drawn by the light, Cassie slid past me into the room.  Tobias, once again perched on her shoulder, directed a critical glance at the tiny alien.

<Rabbits,> he suggested.

I followed them into the room, still watching the piteously wailing puffball.  Something that resembled a softball-sized wad of lint should not have been cute, and yet it was.  Just a little.  It had no visible mouth, so I wasn’t sure how it was making that noise, but those eyes were heartbreakingly huge and moist.

“Rabbits?” Jake asked, crouching in front of the crate.

<They scream when you kill ‘em.  Especially if they’re injured but not dead all the way when you start eating,> Tobias explained.  <And it sounds just like a human kid screaming.  Disturbingly so.>

“You are one hardcore little tweety bird, you know that?” Marco muttered.

We were slowly forming into a loose circle around the crate.  The alien must have noticed our presence, because its cries had subsided into quiet whimpers.  Like it was terrified of attracting our attention but couldn’t help its small noises of pain or fear.

<That’s where you get the old fairy tales about monsters and werewolves luring people into the woods by imitating the sound of a baby crying,> Cassie added.

She wasn’t looking at the alien, more interested in sniffing at the floor over on the far side of the room near the other door.  <People would hear what they thought was a baby in pain just inside the woods, and go running to try and help.  Only it wouldn’t be a baby, it would be a rabbit being killed by a wolf pack.  And most of the time the wolves were still there in the woods, so if they were desperate enough to go after a human...>

She started demorphing as she spoke, as if to punctuate her words.   _Werewolf_ indeed.

“You guys are just founts of fun facts, aren’t you?” I murmured.

“Poor little guy,” Marco crooned.

I turned back around.  He had pried the crate away from the little alien and was gently coaxing it into his hand.

“That's probably not a good idea,” Jake said.

The tiny creature snuggled pitifully against Marco’s hand, shivering.  “It’s okay,” he said gently.  I wasn’t sure if he was talking to Jake or to the alien.

Jake stared at the ceiling as if asking the heavens for patience.  “You don’t know where it’s been.”

“But Daaaaad, if you never let me get a pet then how am I ever gonna learn responsibility?” Marco whined.  He was cradling the alien to his chest now, stroking it with the tips of two fingers.

“For all we know that thing killed everyone on board this ship,” Jake said tiredly.  “And if you really want a pet tribble then you’re going to have to take it up with the team babysitter.”

“Actually I prefer the term ‘zookeeper,’” I said.  “Pays way more than five dollars per hour per kid.”

“Uh, guys...?” Cassie said from behind us. There was an odd note in her voice.

“Cassie, back me up,” Marco said.  “We can’t just leave a poor baby animal all alone in some crappy little cage, right?  Even if it’s a baby animal from another planet?”

“Marco, please just put it back,” Jake said, exasperated.  “First of all, it’s the only living thing on this ship right now, which if you think about it is pretty damn suspicious.  Second, I think we’ve learned with aliens that just because it’s small doesn’t mean it’s harmless.”

I glanced in the direction of the main bay, thinking of the dead yeerks.  Marco shuddered too, but when he lifted his free hand it was not to touch his ear but to cover his nose for a second.

“Third,” Jake said, smiling despite himself, “think about how often one of us trying to pick up a wild animal has ended in getting bitten or stung or peed on.  We don’t know if it’s poisonous or what.”

“Seriously, man, I think it’s hurt.”  Marco cupped both hands around the alien as if he thought Jake was going to try and grab it away from him.  “We can’t just leave it in there—”

“Fourth,” Chapman said dryly, “The scanners didn’t register it as being a life form.  So whatever that thing is?  It’s not an animal, and it might not even be organic.”

That, at least, got Marco to look down at the alien as if faintly doubtful.  “So we’re supposed to leave it to die?” he asked.

I wasn’t about to get involved in this fight, but privately I agreed with Marco.  The alien’s fuzzy face was almost swallowed by the size of its oil-drop eyes, and it had stopped shaking now that it was snuggled against the heat of Marco’s body.  A tiny three-fingered hand had emerged from inside its fur and was clinging to the base of Marco’s thumb.  We were here looking for a predator or a pathogen, not a space gerbil.

“Guys!”  Cassie spoke more sharply this time.

I turned around at the same time Jake did.  Cassie had opened the door to the other room, which was filled with a faint but disgusting odor.  Jake lifted up his tap light, directing the beam into the far room, and recoiled.

The woman lying just inside the door was clearly dead, her yellowed skin tight against the stiffened muscles of her face.  Her mouth was open so far it looked like her jaw was broken, and she had one hand wrapped around the knees that were drawn tightly to her chest.  Her other hand was lying on the deck, reaching toward us.

Beyond her were two other bodies.  Both human, both dead and rigid.  Both kids.

Unflinchingly, Jake slid the beam of light over their outstretched arms, their dark red hair, their blue jeans and blank eyes.  Judging by how much alike all three of them looked, they must have been related.  A mother and her son and daughter, maybe.

I had a sudden flash of the dead woman wrapping her arms around her children, staring upward in terror at the brilliant light of the tractor beam as it dragged them into the sky.  Maybe she’d tried to protect them.  Maybe she’d thrown herself between whatever had killed them and the boy who looked no older than ten or eleven.  Maybe her daughter’s loosely clenched left hand was reaching toward her in those last seconds.  Maybe her own hand was outstretched to implore anyone who might see for help.  Maybe—

It happened so fast there was no conscious thought in my mind.

I spun.  The shredder—there on the floor.  Grabbed it.  Safety off.  Close quarters—Level 10.

Marco’s eyes went wide.  I batted his hand so hard I felt the impact down my own arm.  He was already opening his mouth to say something.

The alien, knocked against the deck, let out a squeal of pain.  Already moving.  The shredder jumped in my hand.

_Tsssseeeeeeeeeeeee—BANG_!

The explosion was deafening.  Blew me back two steps.  Caught Marco and knocked him over.

Literally, it was so loud that I couldn’t hear anything but the ringing of my own ears at first.  As the dust dispersed I stared stupidly at the two-foot-wide hole that had just appeared in the floor, barely able to understand even for myself what I had just done.

But my hearing was coming back.

“Are you INSANE?” Marco was yelling at the top of his voice.  “You could have just SHOT ME!  You ASSHOLE!”

“Oh my god!”  Cassie was shouting too.

“Tom?”  Jake’s voice was just as loud as Marco’s, but warier.  He sounded like he was talking to a crazy person.  “Tom, give me the weapon, okay?  Just give it to me.”

The fingers of my right hand didn’t seem to want to cooperate.  I couldn’t get them to lift properly.  The shredder slipped out of my grasp, landing on the deck with a _clang_.

“Their hands,” I could hear myself saying.  My own voice sounded distant, as if it was a yeerk speaking.  “Jake, _look at their hands_.”

Jake stepped closer, all focus still on me.

Marco was still yelling (“Are you OUT of your stupid little MIND? Or were you actually TRYING to kill me?”) but Cassie at least had heard me, because she was bending over the dead woman’s wrist, expression grim.

Tobias glanced sharply from the bodies to Marco.  <Oh god, he’s right—the marks!>

Cassie stood up, almost kicking the body by accident.  In the dull glow of Jake’s makeshift flashlight, the trio of puncture marks at the base of the corpse’s palm looked almost black against her death-bleached skin.  Jake was already grabbing Marco’s hand, turning it to the light.

There were three beads of blood welling from Marco’s skin at the base of his thumb where the alien had touched him.  Stung him.  It hadn't been holding onto him; it had been injecting him.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.  “I meant to turn the shredder down.  I wasn’t trying to... I was just trying to stun it.”

“You _forgot_ that shredders and dracon beams have opposite numbering systems?” Chapman muttered.  “Hell of a mistake.”

I ignored him.  Jake was still holding Marco’s hand in his own, leaning too close.

“I didn’t feel anything,” Marco was saying, as much to himself as to Jake.  “It... it bit me and I didn’t even feel it.  Like a leech!”  His voice was getting higher, louder.  “Like a _yeerk_!”

“At least it’s gone now so it can’t bite the rest of us.”  If Chapman meant that to sound comforting, he failed.

<It doesn’t have to,> Tobias said grimly.  Which was when I knew he’d spotted the same thing I had.

“He’s right,” Cassie whispered.  “Only the woman has bite marks from that thing on her hand.  On the other two... The bite marks are human.”


	4. Better Be Right

<Jake, buddy, you better be right.>

<Yeah, I’d better be.>

...I waited.  If I was wrong, Marco would die first.

— _The Threat_ p. 84

 

Jake didn’t immediately step back from Marco, even though I was tempted to yank him away.  Marco already looked sickly-pale in the tacky blue glow of the tap light, but that might have just been stress.  Or my own worries coming out.

I stared at the hole in the floor, stomach churning.  I’d destroyed the only specimen.  If we’d had any hope of finding an antidote it had been with the source of the poison.  And now that source was stray molecules scattered around the smoking burn hole in the ship’s outer hull. 

 _Hell of a mistake_ indeed.

“You’re going to be fine,” Jake was saying.  “You just need to morph, okay?  Just like that time with the rabies.”

“Yeah.”  Marco was sweating.  His voice was unsteady.  “Yeah, okay.”

He hunched forward, starting to swell into gorilla shape.

“Uh, Marco?” Cassie said.  “Just in case this is... something, you might want to go small, not big.”

Marco swallowed hard, reversing the morph.  Once he was human again he gave her a pained smile and said, “Is this the part where I tell you to shoot me before you let me start eating people’s brains?”

Jake forced a laugh.  Cassie just looked stricken.

Marco sprouted huge hairy fangs off the front of his face, and for a second I was afraid he was ignoring Cassie’s advice.  But when the second-third-fourth pairs of eyes sprouted out of the sides of his head ( _human_ eyes, at least at first, because that’s morphing logic for you) I relaxed.  The rest of his body steadily shrank down, his arms and legs splitting into extra pairs of limbs, even though just for a few seconds his head remained human size.  And then he was a fuzzy spider, crouched lightly against the deck of the ship.

<How do you feel?> Tobias asked.

<Fine, actually,> Marco said.  <Spidery.  Like I want nothing more than to go snack on some bugs.>

<In that case you might want to demorph,> Tobias said.  <Because the military guys noticed Tom blowing a hole in their ship and started coming on board.  I can hear them running around now.  They’re probably going to find us soon once they stop kicking down doors, and we wouldn’t want you to get stepped on.>

<Okay.>  Marco swelled to the size of a rottweiler before he started sprouting human features, making me extremely glad I wasn’t arachnophobic.  When he was completely demorphed he tilted his hand to the light.

There was no sign of the marks the alien had left.

“Oh thank goodness,” Jake breathed.  He stepped forward, putting a hand on Marco’s arm as if to confirm he was real.

Which was when Marco lunged.

Jake twisted out of the way and Marco’s teeth snapped on empty air inches above his shoulder.

I dove, tackling Marco with more force than grace.  We both slammed to the deck with bruising force.  He landed on top of me, immediately twisting around to try and sink his teeth into my arm.  I rolled out of the way but lost my grip on him in the process.  Just for a second we separated, gasping and staring each other down in the low light.  Marco dove again.  He slammed his weight down on top of me and I grabbed at his arm, trying to shove him back.

His body bucked, shoving his weight forward again.  A barely-human snarl built in the back of his throat.

I threw up my other arm to ward off the blow—and realized my mistake immediately.  Stupid.  We weren’t in a fistfight; he wasn’t trying to hit me. His head snapped forward, mouth open—

And Cassie yanked his arm back so viciously I heard the joint crackle.  She lost her grip on him when he twisted away, but it was enough of a distraction that Jake grabbed that arm and then the other one.  He twisted around, pulling Marco into an armlock and holding him there.

Marco was still writhing in Jake's grip as he tried to turn his head far enough to sink his teeth into Jake’s face or arm, but he couldn’t reach.  Not with Jake holding both his arms twisted behind his back, upper body tilted forward to lessen the strain.

The whole time Marco’s expression was blank, like there was no thought left in his head.  Jake, by contrast, looked like he was on the verge of tears.

I was really really wishing that Marco hadn’t commented on eating brains.

It was then, in the moment of shocked silence, that Marco suddenly relaxed.  Jake’s grip on his arms tightened, but Marco didn’t try to make a move.  Instead he frowned, glancing around at all of us.

Cassie took a cautious step forward.  “Marco...?”

The door burst inward, collapsing against the far wall.

Turns out Tobias wasn’t kidding about them kicking down doors, because that was a _sliding_ door before it had become acquainted with someone’s boot.  I charitably assumed that they had yelled for us to get out of the way and we had missed it in all the chaos.

The scene we presented for the eight soldiers who crowded into the room must have been quite the picture.  Marco and I were both covered in red marks that would soon be bruises.  Cassie had kicked over one of the bodies in her haste to save me from Marco and now rigor mortis made the poor woman’s arm and legs stick straight into the air like she was the world's largest dead housefly.  Jake was still hanging grimly onto Marco, who was back to struggling to get loose.  Chapman had retreated to a far corner of the room, watching everything in shocked silence.  The tap light had rolled away and currently teetered back and forth as it waved its blue cloud of illumination at a random corner.

“What the hell happened here?” Captain Nasland snapped.

<Trust me,> Tobias said dryly.  <As soon as we know, we’ll fill you in.>

“Which one of you discharged the weapon?” he demanded.

I raised my hand, waving sheepishly.  “I’m sorry.  I know I screwed up—”

“Screwed up?   _Screwed up_?”  His face was getting redder and redder.  He strode into the room, stopping when he was inches from my face.  “Is that what you call it?  Is that what you think of this situation?  That this was some little screw-up?  You could have killed someone!  Do you hear me?   _Killed someone!_ ”

I didn’t react, looking him in the eye and letting him yell.  I deserved it.

“You careless, naive _child_!  I knew it was a bad idea involving civilians in this mess.  I knew it.  And you just proved me right, boy!  Do you have any idea how many lives you just put at risk?  You foolish idiot!” he shouted.  “I oughta prosecute you for attempted murder!” 

Jake opened his mouth, expression mutinous.  I shook my head fractionally, and he shut it again.

Captain Nasland was getting even louder, probably because he wanted more of a reaction from me than he was getting.  “I should arrest you right now, I swear to god!  You stupid little boy.  If one of my people had been standing directly outside when you decided to start playing with alien ray guns—”

“He wasn’t playing with guns.”

I startled when Marco spoke.

Marco lifted his head enough to make eye contact with the captain, eyes clear even though his face was flushed with fever.  “He was trying to save my life."

Captain Nasland stopped, looking like he wasn’t sure what to do with himself after his thunder had been so effectively stolen.

“What _happened_?”  It was young Sergeant Grace who spoke that time.

We all looked around at each other, trying to come up with a decent explanation.

“Jake?” Marco said softly.

“Yeah?”  Jake’s voice was so rough I could hardly hear it.

“I think...”  Marco took a deep breath.  He sounded very young.  “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

And then he slumped over unconscious.

******************

Jake became the one to carry Marco's limp body off the ship.  The woman in the business suit recommended "securing" Marco and then bringing a stretcher for him, but Jake didn't even bother to acknowledge this suggestion.

Someone must have radioed ahead, because by the time we all got back into the building there was a makeshift hospital room waiting for us.  Jake set Marco on the provided bed, stepping back and watching grimly as more military personnel in hazmat suits came in to start an IV of antibiotics flowing into Marco's arm.  The rest of us hovered in the doorway uselessly.

"He's going to be all right," Cassie said softly.  "He'll be okay."

I wondered who she was trying to fool.

The hazmat-wearing guys ushered Jake out of the room and back into the hallway.

“I’m going to need a full debriefing from you, son.  We’re going to need to know exactly what happened going forward here.”

I turned around.  The Captain Nasland who faced us was solemn-faced, all anger gone.

“Yeah,” I said, belatedly registering that I was the one being addressed.  “Yeah, okay.”

The Animorphs were all still looking into the room at Marco with fearful longing.  None of them were paying attention to this conversation.

I took several steps away down the hallway, forcing Captain Nasland to follow me.  The others had more important concerns.

"You saw most of what we saw in the ship.  Only there was a... thing," I said quietly.  "Furry, dark grey."  I held up my hands to indicate its size.  "Like, I don't know, like a tribble.”

“Tribble?” he said sharply.  “Where does that species originate?”

I stared at him, baffled.  “The Starship _Enterprise_?”

That got me a concerned look.

I sighed.  “You know, tribbles?  The little fuzzy things from _Star Trek_?  I’m not a xenobiologist.  Sorry.”

“Very well.”  Captain Nasland gestured for me to continue. 

“Anyway, the tribble had already bitten the dead woman—and she had bitten the two kids.  I realized the bite marks on her matched the way it was touching Marco and I...”  I swallowed.  “I just meant to get it off him, but I killed it.  Marco morphed, and afterward he tried to bite Jake, and me.  So whatever infected that woman—it's almost certainly in him too.  And it can't be fixed by morphing."

The formally dressed woman clicked rapidly down the hallway from where she had been watching Marco as well.  "Did you order the extraterrestrial being to cease and desist its hostile activities before you opened fire?" she asked crisply.

I was starting to appreciate why the others had spent half the morning staring at the Army people like they were hopeless morons.  "I'm sorry, _who_ are you?" I said.

“Killing a sentient being of another species is murder,” the woman said.  “If the shooting was not in self-defense...”

“I guess I was defending Marco, okay?”  I said.  Why was this even important right now?

“Did you or did you not engage in an unprovoked act of violence against an alien intelligence?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Because if you did, there will be consequences.  We will not defend you, if it comes to that.”  

“What’re you going to do, lock me up?” I asked.  They couldn’t disappear me.  Jake and Eva would never allow it.  That was small comfort right now, because we still had bigger concerns.

“If necessary, we will lock you all up,” she said.  “We need to maintain quarantine, and that means keeping this whole mess under wraps.”

I took an involuntary step back.  “Wait, what?”

Captain Nasland glanced over at the woman.  He didn’t say anything, but he looked a little startled as well.

“What do you mean, quarantine?”  I was scared I already knew the answer to that question.  Surely they were going to get help for Marco.  Surely they were going to call in every favor they had to try and save him.

“It means that until we can be sure that no one else on this base is infected, we’re not involving any outside personnel,” the woman said.

“ _What_?”  My voice came out even louder than I meant it to.  A few people glanced over at me, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.

“We have three of our best internal doctors and a highly trained microbiologist already working on finding a cure,” the woman said stiffly.  “I have no doubt that they will find a solution within—”

“This thing, whatever it is?  Killed those kids on board that ship,” I said.  “Killed the Skrit Na fast enough that they died before landing it.  This virus _kills people._ ”

“Yes, and we won’t allow it to get that far.”

“By contacting the andalites?” I said.  “Or the World Health Organization?”

She crossed her arms.  “By engineering a solution using our own expertise.”

Captain Nasland cleared his throat.  “That’s what makes the most sense, given the situation.”

I think my mouth was hanging open.  I could not believe this was actually happening right now.  Sure, they’d been annoyed at the suggestion of involving any outside parties before, but everything had changed.  There was at least one life at stake here.  Maybe more.  And they were going to keep their little secret at the expense of a kid’s life?

I glanced toward the other room.  Marco had woken up.  He was struggling weakly against the doctors’ hold, trying to bite down on either one of them.  Captain Nasland pushed past me to go back up the doctors, leaving me alone with scary agent lady.

The situation was a _hell_ of a lot more urgent now than it had been an hour ago.  Were they out of their minds?

“At least you appear to be handling the situation with the level of calm objectivity it deserves.”  The woman dropped her voice conspiratorially.  She even directed a glance over my shoulder as if asking me to share in the joke that the Animorphs were overreacting to one of their own being seriously ill.

“Zombie face.”  I made a vague gesture at myself.  “Trust me, I am not calm.  At all.”

Her eyebrows drew together.  “Meaning what, exactly?”

“That right now I’m somewhere between being baffled that you can all be that stupid and pissed off that you can all be that stupid,” I said.  “The only reason I’m not yelling about it right now is because I don’t think that will do anything to convince you to call for help.  So I’ll say it politely: please call the andalites.   _Now_.”

“They’re starting him on a broad-spectrum course of antibiotics and analyzing blood samples for signs of the pathogen as we speak.”  The woman smiled at me in the way socially awkward adults smile at small children who they think don’t know the difference.  “I know you’re worried right now, but just allow us to handle it and you’ll see, it’ll all be okay.”

I dropped my voice, leaning closer to her.  “There’s a not-outside chance the andalites already _have_ a cure, have a ‘solution,’ and if you waste time trying to reinvent their wheel then Marco’s going to die.  You get that, right?  He’s going to _die_ in there if you don’t call for help.”

“I know this all seems very scary to you, but we know what we’re doing,” she said gently, managing to look down at me even though I was taller than her.  “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of this without having to raise any unnecessary alarms.”

“Why, because asking for help will make your sorry asses look bad?” I said acidly.

She stiffened, but didn’t drop the condescending act.  “I understand that you don’t have much perspective on the situation right now.  But what you need to understand is that the United States is in the middle of the single largest crisis of faith it has ever faced.  Online businesses are going bankrupt left and right, there are already rolling blackouts throughout the state and the energy crisis is only going to get worse if a solution isn’t found soon, people are terrified that authority figures might be controlled by aliens, the military is being undercut by—”

“The fact that you were all upstaged by a bunch of eighth graders during the last war?” I suggested.

She gave me a long, cold look.

“Fine, I get it, you want to protect your own,” I said.  “But surely you can find a way to save your own butts _and_ get him some help.”  I glanced toward the room where Marco was being held.

“Sooner rather than later, you’re going to need to grow up and face the fact that there are bigger concerns at stake here,” she said.  “We have a duty to this country, and to its people, and sometimes that means making the decision to work with what we have to resolve a situation instead of involving outside forces.”

I inhaled, slowly curling the fingers of my right hand into the warmth of my palm.  Punching her wouldn’t help, I reminded myself sternly.  Nor would panicking.  “That’s a really compelling argument,” I said at last.  “But hey, don’t waste your breath on me.  Go ahead and explain to that kid in there that he’s never going to see his family again because you guys need more _faith_ because our state has _blackouts_.”

“As I said, the bigger picture—”

“You’re right about me,” I said, voice low and harsh.  “I’m _not_ keeping the bigger picture in mind.  Right now my focus is really damn narrow.  It’s all on that seventeen-year-old in there whose family has already been through hell in the past five years, who deserves to die a hell of a lot _less_ than the statistically average human being.  Who answered the call to save his species even though he knew better than any of the others he was going to lose people along the way.  Who I watched throw himself between his friends and a fucking _veleek_ when he was fourteen years old.  I’m thinking about him, and I’m thinking about his mother, and I’m thinking about my own little brother who isn’t going to survive losing him.  That’s all.  No politics."

The woman drew her shoulders back, narrowing her eyes at me.  “Well, then, there’s your problem.”

“Yeah.”  Exhaustion settled down on my shoulders.  I wasn’t going to win this one.  “That’s my problem exactly.  And I hope I die before I _grow up_ enough to see the world the way you people do.”

“If you think I’m going to buckle to the pressure of your teenage rebellion just because you know some people who have nice reputations, you are sadly mistaken.”

Before I could say anything else she turned and walked away, heels clicking harshly against the plastic of the floor.

I took a deep breath, staring after her.  They couldn’t just... _let Marco die_.  It was impossible.  They couldn’t.  The base was full of people, and they were just people.  There had to be someone who would forbid it.

Right?

This was all so much bigger, and scarier, than it had been from outside the ship.  I didn't have the words, the actions, the  _anything_ to make them see sense.

Out of options for the moment, I turned away from her retreating back and walked back to the others.  There were two more people in full hazmat suits bending over Marco now.  He already had an IV in his arm, and one of the white-plastic figures was injecting another syringe into his wrist.

Jake and Cassie were watching silently from the doorway, fingers laced together so tightly I could see Jake’s knuckles turning white.  Tobias was perched on the railing next to the door, staring at Marco with a predator’s laser intensity.  Chapman was once again leaning against a wall, looking bored.

“They’re not sending for anyone else,” I said bleakly.

“Yeah.”  Jake leaned into Cassie a little tighter.  “We caught the gist of that."

“I’m sorry.  I tried.”

He nodded, eyes closed.  “I know.”

“What are they _thinking_?” Cassie asked.

“What’s going on?”  Marco spoke suddenly.

Cassie and Jake glanced at each other, and then back at Marco.

“News is that good, huh?” Marco said hoarsely.  He propped himself up on an elbow, apparently in a lucid period again for the moment.  “So.  How long do I have?”

“You’re not going to die,” Cassie said.

“We don’t know,” Jake corrected, smiling apologetically.  “The military... They want to see what the antibiotics will do first.”

“So they’re not letting anyone else in.”  Marco, for one, didn’t sound surprised.

“We’re going to change that,” Jake said firmly.

Marco sat up, ignoring the noise of protest from one of the people trying to jab stuff into his veins, and directed a painful-looking smile at Tobias and Jake and Cassie.  “Well, that makes perfect sense,” he said.  “They screwed this one up eight ways to Sunday, and they all know it.”

One of the doctors cleared her throat pointedly.  Marco ignored her.

“Let’s see.”  He held up one finger.  “Not immediately reporting the crash to the people who, oh, I dunno, would’ve _actually_ known what to do about it.”  Another finger.  “Trying to keep all that tech to themselves, even knowing they weren’t supposed to do so.”  Another finger.  “Sitting around on their butts while their little life form counter watched people inside the ship kick the bucket, including quite possibly those tax-paying American citizens whose bodies we found.”  Another finger.  “Finally sending in a response team—composed entirely of civilians, including four kids.”  Another finger.  “Not alerting the proper authorities about the possibility of a brand sparkly new type of alien life.”  He switched to the other hand with another smile that looked even sicker than before.  “Letting an Animorph die.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Jake said tightly.

Marco shrugged as if too weary to bother arguing with him.  “Point is, right now the kids are so busy sweeping all the broken glass under the carpet and hiding the baseball, they don’t even have anyone trying to fix the window.  And no one’s going to tell their boss she’s wrong because she’s probably the head of the NSA or something and can kill them with her brain.”

“KTVH,” I murmured.  Chapman snorted a laugh.

Jake glanced over at me.

I shook my head.  “Not worth explaining.”

Jake gently extracted himself from Cassie, walking away.  He said something quietly to Captain Nasland, who answered equally quietly.  I could hear them starting to argue again, but I was still looking at Marco.

Marco had gone tense again, breathing harsher.  “I want to bite every single person in this entire base right now,” he said.  “It’s... Cassie, it’s _there_.  I can feel it.”

Cassie pressed a hand against the glass.  “We’re going to fix this,” she promised.  “No matter what it takes.”

“I’d say your chances are pretty good,” I said lightly.  “You guys have gotten out of way worse situations than this in the past, right?”

<Sure,> Tobias said.

“Then let the experts handle it!”  That was Captain Nasland.  He was yelling again.

“I think you and I are thinking of different standards of ‘expert.’” Jake’s voice was much quieter, but even harsher than the captain’s.

I turned.  He and Jake were standing a few feet apart, halfway down the hall from us.  Both of them looked livid.

“How many times do I have to tell you, we are handling the situation,” Captain Nasland snapped.

“No, you’re not.”  Jake was ice-cold, shoulders drawn up with tension.  “Call the people who can help.”

“We are going to continue to work with our _extensive_ internal resources until—”

“Until it’s too late?” Jake demanded.  “Until he’s already—”  He cut himself off, breathing in slowly.  “You are so far out of your depth in this situation, you don’t even know you’re drowning yet.”

“ _We’re_ out of _our_ depth?”  Captain Nasland crossed his arms.  “Son, you’re the one who went charging into an unknown situation without properly securing the perimeter.  Your brother is the one who _conveniently_ destroyed all evidence of this alleged alien of yours, and your friend in there?”  He gestured dismissively toward Marco.  “Has no one to blame but himself for his current situation.  What did he _think_ was going to happen if he picked up an unfamiliar life form and started _cuddling_ it?”

“Don’t you _dare_ pass the buck onto him, you incompetent old man,” Jake hissed.  “I don’t care whose fault it is.  You can give me the blame if you want.  But you _need_ to call for help.  You need to admit that this situation has gotten out of hand, however it got that way.”

Captain Nasland drew his head up.  “Leave this situation to us.  I’m afraid I have to insist.”  He even went so far as to imitate Jake’s exact inflection from earlier.

Jake jerked back as if slapped.  Before it had been almost funny, watching him wind the captain up.  Now...

In the next room, Marco started coughing.  It was several seconds before he got back enough air to stop.

“It’ll be all right,” Captain Nasland said.  He looked like he regretted his sharpness.

Jake stared the captain down for another very long moment.  He was white-faced with anger.  I could see a muscle working in his jaw.

Nobody moved.  Nobody breathed, except Marco still gasping for air.

Jake opened his mouth and both Cassie and I tensed to move forward.  But all he said was, "I understand."

Captain Nasland let out a long breath.  "I'm sorry it can't be different—"

Jake turned away, not bothering to acknowledge him, and strode quickly down the hallway.  He glanced briefly at each of us for a second.  Understanding, we all followed him.

"Okay," Jake said quietly as he walked.  "We're going to need one person on diversion, the rest on piloting."  He was staring straight ahead, not looking at any of us.  "Cassie, I think it makes the most sense if in this case you're Ra—If you morph elephant."  He flinched but kept going.  "Yell, smash, raise a stink.  I'm going to need Tobias to figure out our trajectory and Tom to work the computers.  Chapman, any knowledge of Skrit Na tech _at all_ is going to come in handy."

“I’ll do what I can.”  He sounded doubtful.

"Hang on," I hissed, glancing around at the soldiers walking by.  No one seemed to be paying us too much attention.  "We're going to _steal_ the Skrit Na ship?"

Jake shrugged.  "Unless anyone else has a better plan.  Might be stupid and doomed to fail, but I can't think of another way to get a message to the andalites, and that ship's guaranteed to have z-space comms."

<Can't we just get the computer to send a message from where it is now?> Tobias asked.

"Star Wars," Cassie said.

<Um, is that a metaphor for something?>

She shook her head.  "American missile-defense system.  It was originally conceived as a way to try and keep the Soviets from attacking the U.S.  You know," she added dryly, "back when the U.S.'s biggest concern was getting attacked by Russians.  Anyway, these days it's actually up and running, and not only is it capable of turning back most minor weaponized attacks from outside the Earth's atmosphere, it also does pretty well at blocking signals into and out of the planet to prevent coordination of external attacks.  We're going to have to get beyond it if we want to send a message we don't want the military intercepting."

"So," Jake said.  "Steal the ship, fly it straight up just until we break atmo, send a quick request for help, and put it back where we found it.  No problem."

“Did you miss the part where your idiot brother blew a giant hole it its outer hull?” Chapman said.

I blushed.  Jake turned a steely look on Chapman, who decided to stop talking.

“He’s got a point, though,” Cassie said reluctantly.  She glanced apologetically at me, but added, “If we break atmo in that thing, even if we sealed the bridge first, we’d pass out from lack of air in less than fifteen minutes."

Jake smiled faintly at her.  "I did say it'd be a _quick_  message."

"And you also did specify that it's a stupid plan," I conceded. 

"Think you can fly it?" he asked me.

"Kinda depends on how much tech the yeerks stole from the Skrit Na," I admitted. "But I can read a handful of Galard and thanks to the andalites there are some pretty universal design features.  So... maybe?"

"Great," Jake said brightly.  "Better than the rest of us could do."

"Not comforting, squirt."

"Too bad.  Besides, Tobias is brilliant with aerodynamics so if you can figure out how to make it go he can figure out where to send it."

<Sure.>  He sounded about as confident as I did.  But he was already starting to morph to human so he could help us work the controls.

"Cassie, go around the far side of the base before you start smashing.  See if you can convince them you're just very very angry about Marco.  Do _not_ do anything that's going to make them want to shoot you," Jake added.

"Wouldn't dream of it," she said.

"The rest of us shouldn't have too much trouble getting on board,"  Jake said.  "They don't seem to have too many guards around it."

"Course not," Tobias said dryly, fully human now. "Who in their right minds would want to steal a broken ship no one knows how to fly that's probably a biohazard zone?"

"Okay, I gotta say it, just once."  Cassie grinned.  "This is insane."

"Yeah."  Tobias's answering smile was oddly melancholy.  "Let's do it."


	5. Fly

“Do not attempt to fly a ship undergoing maintenance. Something is bound to go wrong.”

—Ax, _The Revelation_ p. 109

 

"There's no one out there.  Should just we go?" I asked quietly.  All of us except Cassie were hovering just inside the door of the compound, watching the ship closely.  I sincerely hoped no one expected me to be any good at flying that monstrosity. 

Jake shook his head.  "Wait for it..."

"What, some kind of signal?"

_Wham_.

The walls of the base shuddered as if in an earthquake, the entire structure rocking in place and settling back with a _thump_.  All around us people were running toward the source of the sound, yelling to one another.

_Wham_.

This time I stumbled and almost fell, the building jumped so sharply.

<I am very angry!> Cassie announced.

_Wham.  Screeeeeee-CRACK._

From the sound of it, she'd just broken clear through a wall.  Considering what I had seen Rachel do to wood and even concrete structures in elephant morph, Cassie was practically being gentle.  <If you don't let my friend go and contact the andalites, I will knock over every wall in your base!>

_Wham_.

"That enough of a signal for you?" Jake asked, grinning.

Sure enough, no one was paying any attention to the ship now.  I could hear people yelling on the other side of the clearing.  From the sound of it they were trying to bargain with Cassie.

We didn't run across the clearing; we just walked calmly as if we knew exactly where we were going and would be surprised if anyone tried to stop us from doing our rightful jobs.  The hatch was still open from before, and I flipped the switch back over to slide it shut once we were inside.

"Here’s hoping there aren’t more tribbles," Tobias said quietly.

I winced, glancing around.  The lights were still off in the ship.

Outside, Cassie was still going strong.

_Wham._

<And while we're at it, the excesses of spending within the military-industrial complex are a _travesty_!  The U.S. government should be— >

_Wham.  Cra-CRUNCH!_

<Oops, sorry. Should be funding NGOs, not building more outdated stealth bomber technology!>

_Wham._

"Well," I said, as we ran through the ship toward the cockpit, "It's not the most convincing blind rage I've ever heard."

"If she succeeds in knocking their whole base down, it's going to be a moot point," Jake said.  "Besides, it's—"

_Wham_.

<REPEAL—>

_Wham_.

<DON'T ASK—>

_Wham_.

<DON'T TELL!>

Jake grinned.  "It's very _her._ "

We turned down the hallway Jake had found before, running past the fork down which we'd found the tribble, moving toward that dim grey light source.

Sure enough, the hall ended in a narrow doorway; when I ducked through it, we were in what was unmistakably the cockpit of the ship.

There was another one of the little grey aliens lying curled up on the floor, one narrow hand with bite marks on the wrist curled to its chest. None of us touched it, not sure if the infection could spread through dead bodies.

“Emergency power reset,” I said.  “We need to find the emergency power reset.”

“You’re assuming the Skrit Na even _have_ emergency override settings on their ships,” Chapman pointed out unhelpfully.

“If they don’t then this little cruise is literally never getting off the ground,” I said, shrugging.  “Big black lever, usually near floor level,” I told Jake and Tobias.  “It’s gonna have something that looks like a spiky version of the biohazard symbol printed on the handle.”

Even as I talked I skimmed over the instrument panels, rapidly flipping switches to see what would happen.  In contrast to yeerk ships, which usually had awkwardly large controls designed for hork-bajir-controllers and then back-fitted to humans, this had bizarrely small buttons and dials.  It made me feel like I was working with the dollhouse version of a normal spaceship.

Oh, and I only knew what about twenty-five percent of the switches and buttons in front of me even did.  This was going to be interesting.  I switched the engines into startup mode, entering the computer files long enough to switch off autopilot.  The computer beeped at me a few times to tell me to refuel; I ignored it.  We wouldn’t need much juice for this trip.

When I glanced over, Chapman was idly scrolling through the ship’s logs.  “Set that to ‘transmit’ and just broadcast the whole thing,” I told him.

“We don’t know that the humans have anything that can pick it up,” he said.

“Do it anyway just in case.”  I went back to overriding safety controls on the ship’s equivalent of a parking brake, deliberately overlooking the extreme creepiness of him referring to “humans” like a separate species.

“This it?” Tobias asked.

I glanced over to where he was pointing.  “Yes.  Thank God.  Pull it out until it’s perpendicular to the instrument panel, rotate it a hundred eighty degrees, and then slot it back into place.  That’ll switch the ship over to emergency power, turn all the systems back on for a couple hours and—”

The button I’d just pressed caused a screech and _clunk_ somewhere deeper inside the ship, as if I’d just broken something.  Oops.

Tobias must have done what I'd told him, because there was a _whoosh_ and the room filled with oxygen-rich warm air.  The ship’s uniform interior lights switched back on—and so did its carnival-colored rows of exterior lights.

“Get off the ground, get off the ground,” Jake muttered, peering nervously through the windscreen.

“Yeah,” I said tightly, “working on it."

My fingers skimmed rapidly over the controls as I muttered to myself in Galard.  That one was for the defense system, those were the comms, that red switch was a mystery, if those little U-shaped ones were labeled the way I thought they were then this ship had _hundreds_ of air conditioning options... _Fralash_.  Power.  There it was.  I flicked it on.  And underneath were the engine controls.

“Got it,” I said.

I simply shoved all the rear thrusters into full burn—and realized my mistake half a second too late.  We were all thrown forward when the ship tilted wildly.  The downward edge slammed further into the dirt, the upward edge lifting clear off the ground.

The front window suddenly became the floor.  I lost my footing and slammed painfully against it.  Jake hit next to me with a _crack_.

The dead alien slid underneath the console and out of sight.  Chapman grabbed a wall in time, but Tobias rolled down the floor.  The whole craft balanced on one narrow edge for a breathless second, then—

“Look out!” I snapped.

It overbalanced, falling back the way it came.  It slammed to the ground, jarring me to my teeth.  I only managed to keep my feet this time by grabbing the nearest piece of equipment and hanging on.  The ship settled in the dirt with a groan of pain.

And, just like that, we were exactly back where we started.

“What was that?” Jake asked, a little shakily.  He was picking himself up off the floor, rubbing at the elbow he’d bruised in the fall.

“Excessive incompetence.”  Chapman was still upright, hanging hard onto one of the tanks of gas bolted to the wall.

“It's a round ship, _round_ ship, not a Bug fighter,” I said, as much to myself as to them.  “I’m such an idiot.  It’s a disk.  Forward is down, sideways is up.  How the _hell_ do they balance these things?”

"Just hurry," Jake said.

“Whatever you’re going to do, do it,” Tobias said quickly, climbing to his feet.  “They’re going to start firing on the ship if we don’t move.”

I reached toward the controls a lot more cautiously now.  Okay, what if that thing next to the thrusters was the equivalent of an attitude indicator?  I cautiously moved each engine thruster up a few degrees and then back down until one lifted just the down-tilted edge of the aircraft, pushing it upward until we were balanced on the underside bulge of the ship like a top on its point.  Sure enough, the dial slid to the line marked _yawerhy_ for _center_ and stopped there.

“Hurry,” Jake said again.

“You wanna fly this thing, Mr. Smartass?”  I asked tersely.

“Sure.”

“You read Galard?”

“No, but...”

“Then shut up.”

Okay, we were horizontal.  And as I suspected, the little dials in the indicator next to the thrusters were nicely aligned.  Which meant that if I turned them all up just a tiny bit at the same time...

The ship shuddered, tilting back and forth, but it lifted off the ground.  Slowly it began to rise above the treeline, moving straight upward.

“ _Yes_ ,” I whispered, rapidly nudging the thrusters back down.  “Okay, everything is allllllll under control." 

“Why are we spinning?” Jake asked.

“I have no idea,” I said cheerfully.  “But we are definitely spinning in an upward direction.”

“Can you make it go any faster?”

“Not unless you want us to do a few more somersaults.”  I adjusted one thruster after another after another, trying to keep us level.  We were still oscillating gently as we rose, but I didn’t know what to do about that.

Turn right thrusters down.  Overcorrect.  Turn them back up.  Tiny hair-fraction adjustments.  Up, down, up, like balancing a set of scales.  My eyes scanned the rows of dials, checking altimeter-airspeed-fuel-heading-power-attitude and then back again.  The engines were shuddering, but all of them seemed to be firing just fine.

A loud beeping started.  I took my eyes off the stabilizers long enough to look over—it was a warning that we were running on reserve fuel power and had to land at some point in the next twelve hours—and in the two seconds it took me to reach over and turn it off, the ship tilted sharply to the left.

“What’s that flashing light mean?”  Now, if I could just find an off-switch for Jake...

“That’s the warning that there are humans trying to operate the ship,” I told him, not looking up from my rapid delicate adjustments.  “It’s very angry that this is the case, and in ten seconds it will blow up and kill us all rather than let its precious secrets fall into alien hands.”

"That was sarcasm, right?" Tobias whispered. "Because it, uh, didn't really sound like sarcasm."

The engines slid out of alignment with one another and I rotated the ones to the rear, trying to get us back to moving the right way. I kept glancing out the bubble of the cockpit, worried we were about to encounter a flock of birds or a commercial jet at any moment. But so far the skies were clear and cloudless. We were well above the tree line now, the base smoothly falling away beneath us.

Good thing there was nothing to hit, I thought wryly. If we did encounter anything my ability to maneuver this craft wasn't going to be nearly enough to prevent a collision.

"We're tilting to the left," Jake said.

"No shit," I muttered, but I edged the left-side engines up a little.

"Now we're tilting to the right."

“Jake, so help me, if you don't shut up—”

“I'm just trying to help—”

“Well, you're not.  You’re backseat flying.”

“Have you ever even done this before?”

“Me?  Nah.”

“Then—”

“Observational experience, midget.  It’s all about—”

“I bet I could do better.”

“Too bad.”

“Can I try the shredders?”

“What?  No!”

The ship shuddered, tilting off-center again. There probably wasn't time to open the airlock and throw Jake out, which was a crying shame.

I peered down through the windscreen.  The clearing we’d just left was flooded with people looking up.  We were still only about a hundred yards above their heads—I was erring on the side of moving extremely slowly—but short of shooting us down and having us fall on their heads there was no way they could stop us.

“There's nothing you can do about the tilting? Are you sure?”

“Jake,” I said, with what I thought was enormous calm given the situation. “Somewhere on the secondary instrument panel to my right, there is a bright grey light shaped like an oval with two little lines coming out of the bottom.” At least I hoped there was.

“Is that a stabilizer?” he asked.

I glanced nervously down at the Army guys still watching us, and then hastily back toward the thruster controls. “Sure.  Anyway, I need you to watch it very closely and tell me the instant it turns green.”

“Green is bad?”

“These things bleed green.  What do you think?”

“Okay,” Jake said grimly.

“Keep a close eye on that and tell me the millisecond it starts to change.”

He did as he was told.

Great.  Now, in the extremely unlikely event that the tractor beam experienced a sudden drop in power and lost its ability to suck up cows, I would have plenty of advance warning.

The ship had listed to the left again while I was disposing of Jake.  There were controls for a set of secondary wing flaps just above the engine controls, so I switched them on and nudged them all the way into horizontal correction.  The whole craft started shuddering with turbulence so violent that the horizon did a mad up-and-down jig out the front viewscreen.  I sighed.  Han Solo I was not.

“Um,” Tobias said.  Judging by his tone, he was worried that any suggestion he made would also end in him getting snapped at and sent to go stare at a useless instrument panel in the corner.

I didn’t bother either encouraging him or shutting him down, too busy hunting across the instrument panel in search of the actual auxiliary stabilizers.   _Jafresh_ meant approximately the same thing as vertical, so I wasn’t sure whether to try that one, and the dial next to it had just a series of numbers with no helpful unit labels so that was also a mystery…

“I think we’re flying too slow,” Tobias said.

I glanced over at him, and then snapped back around to look out the front viewscreen.  “What?”

“I think that’s what would stop the tilting.  And the, um…”  He made a see-sawing motion in the air with one hand, which was a pretty good summation of how the ship was flying right now.  “See, when you’re flying low, moving real slow, that’s when you’re bouncing up and down.  But when you get up enough speed that you’re thrusting against gravity, it all evens out.  I don’t think it’s designed to fly this slow for this long.  Like we’re riding in eighth gear, and we need to downshift if we want to stop working so hard to move forward and just start gliding.”

It took me a second to sort out that he was talking about bicycle gears, not car gears, but when I did it finally clicked.  I turned to glance at him in surprise—in about ten minutes he’d figured out more about how to work this thing than I knew from three’ years experience—and when I did, the ship once again tilted off course.  I immediately grabbed for the thrusters… and then forced myself to let go.

Slowly I spread my hands over all the little dials at once, and pushed them upward.  The ship lurched.  We shuddered.  We spun.  We steadied, and shot upwards—almost perpendicular to the ground.  The rocking turbulence became a low steady vibration.  The tilting faded into a single steady g-force pushing us down.  The ground fell faster below us.

“Well, _damn_ ,” I breathed.

“I told you to go faster,” Jake said.

I peered up through the windscreen, watching the clouds part around us.  “Midget, shut up and keep watching that light.  Tobias, marry me.  Chapman, figure out what that sound is, will you?”

“I’ll pass, thanks,” Tobias said.  “But, uh, one more suggestion?”

“Anything.”

“Let me be the one to broadcast our location.  I can figure out how to do it in a way they’ll understand.”

“Absolutely.”  I glanced over at him.  “Actually, you know what?  Go over to the communications array there—the one with the palmprint scanner—and pre-record something.  If you just hold down the button directly below the scanner while you—”

“Helicopters,” Chapman said.

“What?” I said.

He sighed.  “You asked me to tell you what the source of that sound was.  There are several helicopters approaching us very quickly from behind.  They should be here—”

Now I could hear the roar made up of hundreds of rapid put-put-putputputput sounds all on top of one another.  The first one lurched into view shockingly close to us, wavering in front of the windshield.

“Air Force training choppers, Iroquois class,” Jake said.  Because that was exactly the kind of extremely helpful information we all needed.

I jumped when the loudspeaker crackled to life.  The voice that blared out was clearly audible even through the walls of the Skrit Na ship, over the sounds of the helicopters.

“RETURN TO THE GROUND AND EXIT THE CRAFT IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT, RETURN TO THE GROUND AND EXIT THE CRAFT IMMEDIATELY, OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE.”

“Geez, we got it, just turn that thing off,” Tobias grumbled.

I didn’t bother to look up.  I was too busy watching the helicopters very closely, nudging tiny adjustments into the thrusters to avoid a collision.  They were way closer than I’d like them to be—apparently they’d overestimated my ability to maneuver in this thing.

“We’re more agile than they are,” Jake said.  “Can we outrun them?”

“Not—”  I hissed, making another small adjustment to the controls.  “Not without running over at least one of them.”

“That’s okay,” Chapman said.  “Do it anyway.”

There were several seconds of shocked silence during which everyone else turned to stare at Chapman in horror.

He shrugged.  “They’re threatening to shoot us.  It would only be fair turnaround to—”

“THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.  RETURN TO THE GROUND AND EXIT THE CRAFT IMMEDIATELY.”

Jake sighed.  “Take us down.”

I glanced at the ground, at the helicopters, at the sky above us.  “Maybe if I gunned it, went straight up...”

“It’s not worth it,” Jake said.  “Besides, odds are they probably have a fighter with missiles on standby right now.  They might just be able to shoot us down if we become enough of a nuisance.”

Reluctantly I backed off the thrusters until we were at minimum power.  The first shift from sharp upward motion to a slow descent was jolting; my stomach tried to climb out my throat.  I reached for the thrusters again to stabilize us, but we were already settling into a slow descent.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly.  If I had just taken off faster, if I’d figured out how to work the thrusters with less useless fucking around...

“We’ll figure out another way.  We’re not giving up yet.”  Jake’s voice was weary.

I didn’t look away from the controls in front of me.  I couldn’t bear to look at him or Tobias.  This was their friend, their teammate, their brother in arms, at stake.

He was Eva’s kid.  I couldn’t forget that, either.

We sank slowly, and the helicopters sank with us.  We had drifted a little away from the spot we’d started, so I cautiously gave a little more power to the rear engines and we drifted over the clearing.  I nudged the rightmost thrusters, and then gave a tiny more power to the left ones.

We were descending at a speed so sedate it was boring, and the turbulence was back, but I wasn’t about to try and make us drop faster.  Not only did I want to avoid us plunging out of the sky, but there were also helicopters all around us, and wind currents from their blades that kept causing the ship to respond in unpredictable ways.  The last thing I needed was to knock into one of these guys and send us both crashing to the ground.

“They’re not the enemy,” Tobias said.  “They’re just doing their jobs.”

Jake didn’t say anything, leaning against the dashboard with crossed arms.

“This is going to be a rough landing,” I cautioned, “mostly because I have no freaking clue what I’m doing.”

This time there were no jokes or snarky comments.

“Kill as much momentum as you possibly can,” Tobias said.  “Hover, then drop.”  He glanced over at me.  “If possible.”

I breathed in, and then let it out in a rush.  “I’ll do what I can.”

When the ground looked like it was only about ten feet below us (even though it was probably more than that), I fired off the thrusters.  Through a little balancing, and a lot more bouncing, I managed to have us hover—and then turned the engines back down.

It was less rough than the landing that had originally put the ship in that clearing.  That’s about all I can say for it.  When the ship had finished creaking and crunching and rolling to a stop, we all looked at each other.

“Not too late for one of you to morph bug and make a run for it,” I told Jake and Tobias.

Jake shook his head quickly enough that I knew he’d considered the possibility too.  “We don’t need them thinking they’re under attack.  If they can come up with reasonable cause to shoot Marco and go after the rest of us...”

“You’re not serious,” I said.

Jake glanced at Tobias, who tilted his head in agreement.

“Right now Marco—and whatever’s inside him—is the biggest threat to them.  If they can make him disappear, and sweep this whole incident under the rug in the process, they might.”  Jake smiled apologetically.  “I honestly don’t know.  And wondering if one of us is going to pop out of the woodwork with guns blazing might be the final straw that makes them trigger-happy enough to go over the edge.”

It took me a second to sort through that god-awful mess of metaphor, but when I did I nodded.  “Okay, then.  Their move?”

“Their move.”

As if on cue the hallway filled with the sound of pounding boots.

“Put your hands on your head and do not attempt to morph!” one of the Army guys yelled.  “Anyone who attempts to morph will be shot on sight!”

Jake raised his eyebrows at me.


	6. Support the Military

"This is a job for the military now," Rachel's mom argued. "You kids have done enough. The secret is out.  Leave it to the people who should be protecting this country. I mean, we paid enough in taxes to support the military; well, now let's see what we got for all that money."  
— _The Answer_ p. 15

 

They yelled. A lot. First Captain Nasland, then the lady who might be a government agent, then three or four other soldiers who apparently also had two cents to add. There were a lot of mentions of us being irresponsible, childish, short-sighted, reckless, blah, blah, blah. One dude in uniform even pulled my parents’ favorite trick of yelling at me for not stopping Jake from doing something stupid, since apparently I was supposed to be Jake’s conscience.

During the first opportunity he got, Jake explained, curtly, what we had been trying to do. And then he shut up and let them yell. He didn’t offer apologies or excuses, which seemed to frustrate them even more.

Two of the Army officers split Chapman off from the rest of the group. When we overheard Lieutenant Clearwater arranging for transport to take him home, we all spent a fruitless ten minutes begging him to take a message to a z-space transmitter to pass on to the andalites.

“I won’t do it,” he said flatly, ignoring the Animorphs and looking hard at me. “Do you know what happens to former voluntaries who rub the U.S. government the wrong way?”

I crossed my arms. “You’re not a—”

“I’m close enough.” He shrugged. “My wife even closer. And what proof does anyone have?”

I shut my mouth. I knew the rumors just as well as anyone—that he and Allison Chapman had joined to keep their daughter from infestation—but all I’d seen with my own eyes was the two of them sitting calmly in a break room during feedings while the rest of us were dragged to and from cages. 

“They wouldn’t...” I stopped talking. It sounded weak even to me. Wouldn’t _what_ , exactly? Throw him in prison? The Army would be happy to do so.

Chapman smiled tightly.

We stared at each other for a few seconds. Of course he had no way of knowing that I’d offered to do the same thing for Jake.  That I was one bad coincidence away from being in his shoes right now. And yet...

And yet he knew this much: I got it. The others didn’t.

"Sorry."  Chapman even managed to sound like he meant it, which was an accomplishment.

I nodded, not sure what to say.

“Fine.” Jake didn’t sound happy, but he also sounded thoroughly done with this discussion.

Two other soldiers were already trying to shepherd our group away from him. Chapman gave me one more look as if asking whether I had a way to get him out of this situation. I shook my head, turning away. I couldn’t quite forgive him for choosing himself over Marco, but I also couldn’t say for sure I’d do any differently if it was someone I loved on the line.

In the end the military guys stashed us all in what appeared to be an unused conference room, next door to the room where they were still holding Marco. It had walls of the same dull grey plastic as the rest of the base, and its only defining characteristics were the long table (no chairs) shoved into one corner and the transparent wall it shared with the containment room where Marco sat on a hospital bed. Cassie was already there, human again, and visibly annoyed.

“Did it work?” she asked, as we were shepherded inside.

Jake shook his head.

Cassie glanced over at Marco, and then back at Jake. “Okay,” she said softly.

“We’re not giving up yet,” Jake said.

“Just _stay here_ ,” Captain Nasland snapped. He actually pointed at the ground as he spoke, like we were a group of disobedient puppies.

Jake turned away from him, walking over to the large window that looked into the room where they were holding Marco. “How you holding up, man?”

Marco was sitting on the edge of the industrial gurney, IV trailing from where a large needle was sunk into his left elbow. He was definitely paler now, eyes wide and dark against his skin. “So I’m guessing all that hoopla was you guys trying something stupid?”

Cassie shrugged, looking self-conscious. “I broke a wall.”

Marco snorted. “I’m going to assume that didn’t go well, or you’d have told me the good news by now.”

 _Thunk_.

We all looked up. Two of the Army guys had dragged a Gleet Biofilter over and jammed it against the translucent plastic door of the observation room.

“Yeah,” I muttered, “since one of those will totally hold us forever.”

“Stay,” Captain Nasland said again.

“For how long?” Marco’s voice was deliberately whiny. He was trying to get information, but also to be non-threatening.

Captain Nasland took a deep breath. “Until the drugs start working or we find something else that does.”

“Here’s hoping I don’t die first,” Marco said cheerfully.

Jake flinched.

******************

“I feel stupid and contagious!” Marco yelled, pacing around in circles. “Here we are now, entertain us! A mulatto! An albino! A mosquito! A libido!”

<How long do you think he can keep it up?> Tobias asked.

“If he loses his voice he can always just morph,” Cassie said. “So... indefinitely?”

The IV line lay abandoned on the bed, the plastic bag it had been attached to entirely empty. Whatever the drugs had been trying to do, it hadn’t worked; Marco was getting even paler and more manic in his movements, his skin wet with sweat.

“... and they’re gone sooo fast, yeeah oooh, so hold on to the ones who really care. In the end they’ll be the only ones theeeere...”

He’d already been at it for a good twenty minutes and was showing no signs of wearing out. The singing had come after he’d decided his over thirty minutes of demands for “a GameBoy! A television! Just one little cell phone! Fucking crayons! Something!” were not going to get the desired results. So now he’d decided to protest the lack of entertainment by—

“—today was gonna be the day but they’ll never throw it back to you, by now you shoulda somehow realized what you’re not to do—”

—annoying the rest of us to death.

Jake was watching Marco too closely, shoulders hunched and a little frown pulling his eyebrows together. He was worried. Which was making me worried. If I had to take a guess, the thing he knew that I didn’t was that _this_ —

“—oh baby baby, how was I supposed to know that something wasn’t right here, oh baby baby, I shouldn’t have let you goooooooo—”

—was what Marco looked like about two inches away from blind panic. He kept sitting down—on the bed, on the floor, up against the wall—and then jumping up again as he sang. The inside of his wrist where he’d been stung was raw from where he kept scratching at it, but he didn’t seem to notice as he scrubbed it along the top of his knee.

“I get knocked down! But I get up again! You’re never gonna keep me down! I get knocked down! But I get up again!”

<Yeah,> Tobias muttered, <you’re _gonna_ get knocked down. >

The rest of us were also... tense. Tobias kept fluttering around in circles and, even when he landed, repeatedly adjusting his perch on the floor. Jake was quiet but fidgety, pacing or drumming on the glass or turning to watch the rest of us any time someone moved. Cassie had examined every corner of the room in exacting detail and was now repeatedly checking out the window like she expected the view to change at all.

I, for one, had settled down in a comfortable position and switched off my personality to save on battery power. I wasn’t sure I’d had blinked or shifted position in the two hours since then.

“—think about it every night and day, spread my wings and fly away. I belieeeeeve I can sooooar, see me running through that open dooooooor—”

It occurred to me that the others were probably getting claustrophobic. There were five of us stuck in what was essentially a glorified break room without the coffee maker or chairs, so they might have started feeling cramped. I wouldn’t know; after existing for so long in about three square inches of real estate inside my own skull I wasn’t exactly bothered by having an entire small room to move around in.

“—say it ain’t so, I will not go, turn the lights off, carry me home, keep your head still, I’ll be your thrill, the night will go on—”

There was still no word from the Army guys. Twice people in lab coats had come in long enough to draw blood from Marco (which hadn’t dampened the singing at all), but no one had come up with anything approaching useful information so far.

“—strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words, killing me softly with his song, killing me softly, with his song—”

<My ears are bleeding,> Tobias said.

“Well,” Jake said diplomatically, “At least he hasn’t cycled back to the dirty rewrites of Battle Hymn of the Republic yet.”

“Actually, maybe he should cycle back,” I piped up. Partially just to inform everyone, including myself, that I hadn’t quietly died at some point in the last ninety minutes. “Those at least were annoying the Army people.”

Jake turned around slowly, giving me an I-can’t-believe-we’re-related look. “Air Force,” he said slowly.

“Huh?”

“They’re not Army. They’re Air Force. Probably why they have Air Force uniforms and Air Force helicopters and are here dealing with a spaceship, which currently falls under Air Force jurisdiction.”

“No need to get all snotty, midget. I don’t know anything about the military.”

“They have little wings on their uniforms!”

“Yeah, and so do flight attendants!”

“Oh, in that case,” Jake drawled, “I guess we should have all assumed they were flight attendants. What with the _blue_ military uniforms and the giant guns—”

“Okay, if you’re so smart, how come the _Air Force_ is wearing _Navy_  blue?” I demanded.

“For one thing, it’s _royal_ blue—”

“So shouldn’t they be a part of, I don’t know, the royal mounted forces?”

“And for another, this kind of thing is actually important to know in case of—”

“What, foreign invasions? Since they were so much help _last_ time?”

“That is completely—”

“Knock it off!” Cassie yelled.

I shut my mouth mid-retort. Jake and I both stared at her in surprise.

“Thank you.” Cassie looked a little chagrined. “Now. Are you two going to admit that it’s not each other you’re actually angry at, or am I going to have to separate you before the name-calling starts?”

"Sorry," Jake mumbled.

"Yeah," I said.

Tobias shifted in place, shaking out his wings. <Whatever branch of the military they are, shouldn't we focus on trying to persuade them to help us?>

Marco had stopped singing, I realized belatedly. He was leaning against the glass wall that divided our cells, gnawing on a thumbnail.

He looked like shit. Strands of his hair were plastered to his neck with sweat, and he was pale, breathing in rapid shallow pants. Maybe it was just from fear, I thought. Maybe.

"I think we pretty much threw that possibility out the window within ten minutes of getting here," Cassie said.

Jake winced.

"And even if we didn't, Cassie redecorating their back wall while the rest of us tried to steal their stuff didn't help," I pointed out.

<Isn't there something we could offer them or something?> Tobias insisted.

"You mean besides volunteering to sit down and shut up?" I asked.

Marco smiled grimly. If he'd been intentionally setting us up to make that offer, he'd done a pretty good job of it.

"Okay, but..." Cassie glanced at Marco, moistening her lips. "We can't give up. Not yet."

"Nobody's giving up." Jake stood up suddenly, pacing in a circle. "Nowhere close. Okay. Okay. What could we give the Air Force in exchange for them letting us get help?"

"Morphing power," Marco said immediately.

"Too dangerous to risk it." Cassie shook her head. "The U.S. military is already far too powerful. If we handed that over on top of everything else—"

"Gee, thanks." Marco pushed off the glass with angry force. “So what is going to be worth the risk for you? Should I go infect a few other people just to be sure?”

"Hey, hey." Jake went over to Marco, leaning his forehead on the dividing wall directly across from where he stood. "You know she didn't mean it like that, man. We're gonna be just fine, so let's try and keep it together until then. Okay?"

Marco nodded tightly.

"We cool?"

Marco's teeth were still clenched, but he nodded again.

"Okay," Jake said. "Cassie? I hate to say it, but if we offer, and they take it..."

She nodded, biting her lip.

“Assuming, of course, that they’re still willing to piss on us if we’re on fire,” I said.

Jake took a breath—and then let it out without saying anything. He was dull-eyed with exhaustion. “It’s...” He shook his head, stopping himself.

<What?> Tobias said.

“They had their guns drawn when they came in,” Jake said reluctantly. “Drawn, loaded, pointed at us... They knew what they were going to find in the cockpit, and they still had unholstered weapons in hand.”

“They’re not going to kill us, right?” Cassie frowned. “They wouldn’t.”

“‘Never point a gun at something you’re not willing to destroy,’” Jake said. “That’s the first rule of basic training. If they had guns on us, they’re willing to face the consequences for killing us. And for what? For... _stuff_?”

He was looking at Cassie, but I spoke up. “It’s not just about the ship.” I paused, trying to find words for what I wanted to say without adding to Jake’s worry. “I think, on some level, it’s kind of personal.”

“Yeah,” Jake said, “I get it, I shouldn’t have—”

I held up a hand. “Not just now. I mean, this is about how the military feels about _all_ of you in general, about the war as a whole. It’s...” I huffed a small laugh, unable to look at any of them. “Do you have any idea how it feels, to be this tiny squishy human amidst these... clashing titans, who're using alien technologies and alien species to fight over your very _bodies_? To have no natural defense, no way even to understand what’s going on, no means of fighting back? To be _that_ helpless? To know that no matter _which_ side wins, you’re probably not going to survive the—?”

Jake flinched. I cut myself off.

“‘When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers,’” Cassie said.

I gestured to her. “Yeah. What you said.”

“Not mine. It’s...” Cassie frowned as if thinking. “I don’t remember who said that.”

<‘African proverb,’> Tobias provided. <That’s all she had written underneath the quote.  I remember that one too.>

Cassie looked at me. “She would have all these little post-it notes with famous quotes on them stuck to her bulletin board. Most of them were about war,” she added with a sad smile.

“So, yeah,” I said. “They’re sick of feeling like grass. They want to trip some elephants. It’s not nice, but I think that’s what’s going on here.”

“It’s a metaphor? I thought she pinned that one up because it had to do with elephants,” Jake admitted.

“And that would be why you once got a fourteen percent on an English test and almost moved Mom to tears during her subsequent rant on the importance of language,” I drawled.

“Yeah, yeah, but the point is that maybe we shouldn’t be trying to bargain with the Air Force,” Jake said. “Which, okay, but do you have any better ideas?”

"You ever think about skin?" Marco said suddenly.

I blinked.  "As a thing we could offer them?"

"No, like..." He moistened his lips. "Like, the skin itself. It's all right there. All over the surface of things."

"Marco?" Jake's voice was soft with uncertainty.

Marco grinned at him. "You know what I mean, right? You've felt it too. When you just look at skin and you just wonder what it would be like if you bit down. Sank your teeth into it. Tore off a chunk. Like... losing control of a morph. Where sometimes it feels so damn good just to give in. Ask Tobias. He knows what I'm talking about. When you bite down. When you tear into it. When it stretches. When it peels off in strips. When it’s so chewy you could just turn it over in your mouth for hours. When it bleeds. The skin, and then the blood. Like it was meant to pop and peel."

<Sure,> Tobias said warily. <Skin.  It’s real nice.  You okay, man?>

“Nope,” Marco said brightly. “I’m dying, remember?” He licked his lips again. “But, like, all that skin, it’s just _there_. Nobody talks about it, but we all know. It’s just waiting for—”

When he curled forward on himself we all took a step toward him, as if moving to help even though we couldn’t. But he wasn’t seizing, or passing out. He had grabbed his own arm, the one the tribble had stung, between his front teeth.

“Marco!” Jake banged on the dividing wall. “Marco, snap out of it!”

He was gnawing hard now, a section of his wrist jammed into his mouth. Blood dribbled around his lips. His jaw worked with furious power. Grinding down. Forcing dull human teeth to penetrate through muscles and veins and... skin.


	7. All That We Could

Jake smiled sadly. “I’m not sure I could live with myself if we didn’t do all that we could.”

Billions of lives weighed against the ethics of six “kids...”

“And I’m not sure I could live with myself if we did,” Cassie answered softly.

— _The Deception_ p. 26

 

“Someone help!” Cassie yelled.

<Marco, stop it!>

“ _Marco!”_

The door of the containment room burst open.  Two men in haz-mat suits surged inside, grabbing Marco by the arms.  He immediately twisted around and started trying to bite them instead, bloody mouth thrashing at the air.  His wrist, when he let go of it, was a gory mess: skin shredded, deep punctures into the muscle underneath, dark blood rapidly spreading all around the ragged holes.

Both of the technicians were yelling.  One fumbled a syringe from the cart next to the door.  Working together, they held Marco down.

Jake had both palms pressed against the glass, breath fogging on its surface.

The technician found a vein on Marco’s arm.  The needle slid in.  The plunger depressed.

Marco didn’t fall unconscious right away, but he did become limp and relaxed.  He fought against the sedative for a few minutes, but then his eyes closed.

The technicians had a whispered conversation.  One lifted Marco carefully and put him on the bed.  He was sleeping, or unconscious, but shallowly: his eyes flickered under their lids and his right hand still twitched weakly.

We were all watching the drama in the next room so intently that no one noticed when someone walked into our room until she spoke.

“Obviously, the antibiotics aren’t working.”

We all turned to look at the new woman.  She had thick black hair in a heavy braid, but the otherwise harsh lines of her strong-jawed face were softened somewhat by the round purple-framed glasses perched on her nose.  Although she was in uniform, she also had a clipboard held in one hand.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” she asked.

“You mean these symptoms?” Cassie said at last.  “No.”  Her tone was flat, uncompromising.

<We probably would have mentioned it before if we had,> Tobias added.  <Seeing as our primary concern is fixing him, not hanging onto our secrets at all costs.>

The woman’s expression froze for several seconds as if she was willing herself not to react.  When she did speak, her tone was clipped but civil.  “Allow me to begin again.  My name is Dr. Holly Short.  I’m the research specialist that Captain Nasland and Agent Villard called in as soon as the problem became apparent.  Although we remain hopeful that Mr. Alvarez will be able to fight this infection off on his own—”

<You’re giving up?> Tobias demanded.

She cleared her throat.  “The human immune system routinely fights off the overwhelming majority of pathogens it encounters.  However, we are doing what we can to boost his natural immune functioning through application of HyQvia, a drug approved for assisting the body in fighting off infections, and through...”

The medical babble continued for a bit, not that I could follow.  Maybe somewhere in there was a key ingredient that Marco had which the other humans in the ship hadn’t, but I doubted it.

“If you’re so confident in that course of action, what do you need us for?” Jake asked.

“We’re attempting to isolate the pathogen right now,” she said, “and so far our tests for viruses, bacteria, fungal infections, and autoimmune responses have yet to reveal anything.”

“Not surprising,” Cassie said.  “It’s not from Earth, so for all we know it doesn’t even have proteins or carbon molecules.”

“Unfortunately, my expertise is almost entirely in the understanding and containment of Earth-based pathogens.  While I am on the cutting edge of xenopathology...”  Dr. Short shrugged.  “The field is limited, and in its infancy.  Any information that you can provide, anything at all, would be incredibly helpful.  You are, after all, the leading experts on alien species currently at our disposal.”

“No, we’re not,” Jake said, expression sour.

Dr. Short pressed her lips together.  “I’m aware that your knowledge is limited, but it is still less limited than our own.”

“Not enough to make a difference,” Cassie said.  “You need to access andalite information, if you want anything approaching a scientific study of other species.”

“She’s right.”  Jake crossed his arms.  “We can’t help.  But we do know who can.”

“Careful review of the ship’s logs reveals that it came from Kelbrid space shortly before cutting through the Andromeda galaxy, circling the near the center of the Milky Way, and then coming to Earth.”  Dr. Short tried again.  “Does any of that mean anything to you?”

<It probably would to someone who had actual experience navigating the galaxy,> Tobias said.  <If you felt like contacting them, that is.>

Without even seeming to realize it they’d fallen into a sort of phalanx, with Cassie at the vanguard and Jake immediately behind her left shoulder.  Tobias had fluttered over to perch on the table at her right.  I wondered if they had any idea how incredibly intimidating they could be when ranged out like that.  Dr. Short had a stronger spine than I did, that she was still staring them down.

“Unfortunately that decision is out of my hands.”  Dr. Short refused to back down in the face of their shared resistance.  “So either you can help me with the immediate solution, or you can continue to be obstinate to argue a point."

“We’re not the experts you’re looking for,” Cassie said wearily.

“Any information you might have, even second-hand, might be invaluable to the search for a cure,” Dr. Short said.  “Or at least a vaccine.”

“No it won’t,” I said.

For the first time since walking into the room she turned to look at me.  “Excuse me?”

“Look.”  I glanced at the Animorphs.  “No offense.  But you guys have interacted with, what, a dozen alien species?”

Jake thought about it for a second.  “Yeah, more or less.”

I turned back to Dr. Short.  “The yeerk security database for the Earth invasion listed just over thirteen _thousand_ species that were considered Class Four and therefore potential threats.  And those are just the ones the yeerks knew about, and considered threats.  To the best of my knowledge, they believe that there are just over eight hundred million sentient or semi-sentient species in the accessible universe.”

Tobias breathed a curse.

“So the point is,” I said, “none of us has anything that’s going to help you.  Not even as far as narrowing it down goes.”

She was looking at me with new interest.  “And how many alien species have you interacted with?”

“As of today?”  I shrugged.  “Two.  If you want to call shooting that tribble-thing ‘interacting,’ that is.”

That earned me a _don’t-bullshit-me_ stare.

I lifted my chin, meeting her eyes.  I was telling the truth—maybe I’d _observed_ more species than that, but the yeerk had always been the one to _interact_ with them.  And I wasn’t feeling charitable enough to get into that distinction with her.  Not when I didn’t have any useful knowledge anyway.

“What about the humans?” I asked.

Dr. Short frowned.  “I’m sorry?”

“The dead humans on board.”  I tried to sound less challenging.  “Who were they?  Can you tell anything from their bodies?”

She looked down at her clipboard.  “Cornelia, George, and Kate Whittaker-Austin.  All deceased.  Autopsies are in progress.”

I winced.  “Do they have any surviving family?”

“We’re looking into that.”  Dr. Short looked up.  “But in the meantime, anything that you can tell us about these types of aliens would potentially be of enormous help.”

“We wish we could help.”  Cassie broke in.  “Honestly we do.  We just don’t have enough knowledge.  Not about this.  We don’t even know if it’s a bacterium or a virus or some new kind of poison or what.  We don’t know if there’s something in every home first aid kit that could help Marco, or if his case requires specialized treatment.”

“She’s right—we’re not the ones you want to ask,” Jake said.  His tone was gentle.  “That help is out there, but we’re not it.  You know what the solution is here.  You just don’t have the courage to take it.”

Dr. Short looked from one of us to the other.  She took a deep breath, weighing what she was about to say.  “If you think of anything else, please let me know.”

She turned and walked out.

There was a long, heavy silence.

Cassie became the first one to say it.  “Assuming for the moment that playing nice with the military is off the table... now what?”

I glanced at the door.  There was a guy standing in the hallway to guard us, but he couldn’t see most of the room we were in through the transparent-plastic doorway thanks to the opaque walls.

“We could always make a run for it,” I pointed out quietly.

They all turned to look at me.

<You’re right,> Tobias said.  <I mean, these walls are plastic.  Thick plastic, but we’d have no trouble smashing one down if we tried.>

“And Marco?” Jake asked.

<Grab him and bring him along.>

“And then what?” Cassie asked.  “We’re, what, somewhere in southern Nevada?"

Okay, she had been keeping closer track of the drive than I had if she even knew that much.

<Yeah,> Tobias said.  <So we all break out, and then one of us goes for help while the others stay with Marco.  Heck, there’s probably a z-space communicator we can use as close as the planetary landing strip in Las Vegas.  That’d be about a four-hour flight, which is doable.>

“He’s unconscious,” Jake said, at almost the same time Cassie said, “They have guns.”

Again I glanced at the window set into the door.  We could hide from the guard using the sight lines of the room, probably long enough to morph, but he’d sure as hell notice if we smashed through a wall.  The machine gun strapped into the holster across his shoulder might not stop all of us at once, but a bullet to the head would probably kill any one of us just fine, morphing or no.

<Okay, but _if_ we made it... >  Tobias shuffled in place, talons scratching the mahogany surface of the table.  <I just mean, we have to do something.>

I was starting to regret having brought up the idea.  Trying to hang on to Marco when he was like this would be difficult at best, impossible at worst.  If one person had to make an eight-hour round trip just to get the message out while the rest of us tried to keep the morph-capable crazy guy in one place...  And if he did get away from us...

“Even if we did break out,” Jake said in an undertone, “We couldn’t take Marco with us.”

He took the words right out of my mouth.  Which was lucky, since I wasn’t going to be the one to bring that point up.

Tobias glanced over at where Marco was curled up on the bed, still breathing softly.  <But...>

“ _War of the Worlds_ ,” I said dully.  “ _The Martian Chronicles_.” 

“How about North America in the sixteen hundreds.”  Jake raised an eyebrow.

<Yeah, yeah, I get it.  You’re saying that since it’s a brand new disease, then this... whatever he has... could wipe humanity off the face of the Earth.>

“Maybe not wipe out,” Cassie said dryly.  “Smallpox only killed about ninety percent of the Native Americans who got it.”

“Oh, well _that’s_ reassuring,” I muttered.

<Look, that doesn’t even make sense.>  Tobias glanced at Marco again.  <I might not know much virology outside of sci-fi, but I do know that you can’t _actually_ turn the whole world into zombies if the only way to spread the disease is biting. >

“Maybe, maybe not.”  Cassie was watching Marco now too, even though he wasn’t really doing anything.  “Think about how viable this thing is.  Normally most diseases can’t even spread from one type of mammal to another—When’s the last time you got a cold from your cat?  But this, whatever it is, has managed to kill Skrit Na, humans, yeerks...”

“Andalites,” Jake added softly.

We all looked at him.

He took a deep breath, offering us a wan smile.  “In the one room I said was empty.  The body was on the floor.  I don’t know for sure what killed her—I didn’t look that close.”

“Anyway,” Cassie said, “that means that this pathogen is extremely good at reproducing, at finding hosts pretty much regardless of the physiology of...”

I lost the thread of what she was saying.  My skin had gone cold all over.  Now I was the one turning to look at Marco, because the alternative was staring at Jake in horror.  The others didn’t seem to have figured it out, but I could tell he had: If the andalite he’d seen couldn’t fight off the disease, who was to say that the rest of the andalites had any way to stop its course?

We’d all been acting like the andalites would be able to fix everything if we could just get the chance to explain the problem to them, but of course we had no guarantee of that.  In fact, given their track record with helping other species, phoning E.T. and getting the wrong war-prince on the other end could mean that the whole planet got quarantined and left to its fate.

But it wasn’t like saying any of this out loud would do any good.  Right now the andalites were literally our only hope, and Jake was right: we had to try.  No matter what, we had to keep trying right up until the last possible second.

“So are you even sure it’s a virus at all, if diseases can’t spread between species?” I asked.  “Could it be, I don’t know, radiation poisoning or something?”

“We have seen diseases jump between species, though,” Cassie said.

Jake glanced over at me.  “Remember that time when I got the flu in ninth grade?”

“And you threw up in the bathroom sink because you were too fever-addled to tell the difference between that and a toilet?  Vividly,” I said dryly.

“ _Anyway_ ,” Jake said with enormous dignity, “I caught that from Ax.”

“Great!  How’d you guys fix that one?”

<We didn’t,> Tobias said.  <We just got better after a while.>

“Cassie fixed Ax,” Jake pointed out.  “But, uh, that involved her performing brain surgery on him with a power drill, so I...”  He looked over at Marco again, and now his gaze seemed to stick there.  “I think we should save that for a last resort.”

“For the sake of my own sanity I’m going to assume that you’re either lying or exaggerating about the power drill,” I said to the ceiling.

“Parasitoid!” Cassie snapped her fingers.

We all turned to look at her.

“That’s the name of the type of organism that is a parasite and a predator,” she explained quickly.  “The type that gets inside a host and alters its behavior with the eventual intent of getting its host killed in order to go to the next stage of the life cycle.  See, a true parasite doesn’t harm the host at all, just lives there comfortably—”

“I have some objections to your definition of _not harming the host at all_ ,” I muttered.

She shot me an apologetic smile.  “Anyway, they’re called parasitoids, and I... just remembered that.”

<So it’s nothing that could help us,> Tobias said flatly.

Cassie sat down.  “Probably not.”

“Hang on, keep chasing this thread,” Jake said.  “Anything else you remember could be something we could use.”

She smiled tentatively at him, glancing over at Marco again.  “It could mean that the, uh, tribble?  Wasn’t poisoning him.  Might have been just another helpless host itself.  It might have died anyway if...”  She glanced at me again.

“If I hadn’t blown it to kingdom come?” I suggested.

“If we were able to dissect it, figure out whether there are any macroscopic organisms inside it that shouldn’t be...”  Cassie shrugged.

“Don’t worry,” Marco said suddenly.  “I’m sure another one will come bursting out of my chest in another few minutes here.”

Apparently whatever drug they’d used on him was short-acting, because he was sitting up, blanket from the hospital bed wrapped around his shoulders.  The smile he offered us was more than a little manic.  I could tell he was sweating, even through the thick glass that separated us.

“If that was going to happen it already would have by now,” Jake said placatingly.  “How are you?”

Marco gave a small shrug, blanket slipping off one shoulder.  “Great.  Awesome.  Never better.  Frickin’ _spectacular_.”  He hunched forward, pulling into himself like he was in pain.

Jake watched him for another few seconds, but he didn’t say anything else.  Eventually Jake turned away with a sigh.  “Cassie, are we going to gain anything by telling that doctor it’s a whatyamacallit?”

“Maybe, if they’re actually allowed to use medical contacts to look up more information,” Cassie said bitterly.  “All I’ve got is that it might be bigger than your typical pathogen, and antibiotics probably wouldn’t work.”

<Yeah, we already knew that,> Tobias said.  <Any idea what would work?>

Cassie swallowed, looking around at all of us.  She stared at Marco for the longest, expression anguished.  She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, and then tried again.  “I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  It's—”

“Hey,” Jake said, curling a gentle hand around her elbow.  “Hey, it’s okay."

"It's really fucking not." Marco's voice was strangely gentle for the harshness of his words.

"I just meant..." Jake sighed. "We’ll figure something else out.”

"Right, like whether they'll replace me with Leonardo DiCaprio on my TV show or just do some dumb heartbreaking episode where they kill off my character?" Marco said.

Jake rolled his eyes. "You _want_ to be replaced by some old white guy?"

Marco tilted his head, sweaty hair sliding against his face.  "It's not easy finding actors as devastatingly cute as I am, but Leo almost qualifies."

"Yeah, but the fans would rebel," Jake said. "Might as well live."

"Not so sure that option is still on the table, man." Marco tried for a smile and didn't quite succeed.

"Don't you dare talk like that.  We will figure something out.  We will."

I wished I had Jake's confidence.  Judging by the look on Marco's face, so did he.

“Okay.”  Cassie took a deep breath, smoothing both her hands down the fabric of her leggings.  “Okay.  We can figure something out.  We can.  I just... I really wish Ax was here.”

“Yeah,” Marco said hoarsely.  “Me too.”  There was a little too much desperation in his voice for it to be as ironic as it tried to be.

“Well, unless any of you guys can drop him a psychic wave, we’re going to have to focus on the problem of the military people,” I said.  It probably came off sounding even less sympathetic than I meant it to, but as much as Marco drove me up the wall I also didn’t want him to go and die while we all sat around debating impossibilities.

Tobias's head jerked around, his laser predator’s gaze focusing on me.  <Oh my god, you're brilliant!>

“Thank you.  Why?”

<Mirrorwave calling.>

Jake pushed himself to his feet.  “We’d need, what, a thought-speech generator, an amplifier, and that’s it?  The Air Force has one in that entry room, so if we borrowed it..."

“Mirrorwave calling wouldn’t necessarily get through to Ax specifically.”  Cassie had stood up now too.  She looked just as excited as the others.  “But it would be loud enough to blast a signal out to pretty much any andalite on Earth—”

<Some morph-capable humans, too.>

“And maybe even some of the ships in low atmosphere orbit,” Cassie said.  “And all we’d have to do is beam out a massive distress signal, tell them it’s addressed to Ax but we’d appreciate any kind of help.”

Jake must have caught the baffled look on my face, because he turned away long enough to explain.  “It’s how we found Ax in the first place.  Mirrorwave calling basically amplifies any existing thought-speak signal, and if you make it loud enough, it’s like yelling into a psychic megaphone.  You bounce the signal off two different transmitters, then... Okay, I don’t know how it works, just that it does.  There’s no finesse to it, of course, and no real controlling who hears and who doesn’t, but if we do it right—Well, Ax got through to Tobias and Cassie from over sixty miles away, including through at least two miles of just ocean depth.”

“We just need to figure out how to get ahold of one of their z-space comms,” Cassie said.  “Forget getting out of atmo, forget bypassing Star Wars, forget trying to get to Ax directly.  We just yell as loud as we can and hope that someone already on Earth comes along and either passes the message along or even shows up in person.”

“Or starts asking questions our friends here can’t answer,” Marco pointed out.  “Once we raise enough of a stink that the andalites already know what’s happening, they’re going to have a choice: either let everyone in, or close ranks and wait for the inevitable blast.”

“Okay, we should leave two people here and send two for help,” Jake said.  “If anyone would rather stay here, speak up, but otherwise I’m going to assume we’re all willing to go, in which case...”  He glanced around.  “Well, we don’t really have a way to draw straws, but Marco, if you want to think of a number—”

“Hate to interrupt you in the middle of overthinking yet another simple concept, squirt, but Tobias and I go, you and Cassie stay,” I said.

“Um, okay, why?” Jake said.

“Reputation, reputation, reputation, Big Jake,” Marco said.  “No idea how they’re going to cover up my disappearance, but it’ll be a thousand times worse if two of us are on the line.  Bird boy’s a nonentity to any press people that aren’t cryptid hunters, and Tom’s Mr. Pretty Face, Robot Personality.  You and Cassie are still valuable enough that they’re not likely to end up pissed off enough to try and use you as hostages or make you disappear."

“You read way too many tabloids for your own good, you know that?” Cassie said.

“Okay,” Jake said.  “Okay, fine.”  He looked more worried now, the excitement of having another plan having worn off.

Even if (like me) he thought Marco was being a little too cynical about the whole situation, it was still concerning that Marco was being that cynical in the first place.

<Hate to say it, but if they catch us messing around with their equipment, they might still shoot us,> Tobias said.

Marco waved a hand in the air like he was asking a question in school.  “Does Tom even have a fly morph?”

I wilted.  “Oh.  No.”

Jake stared up at the ceiling as if hoping for inspiration.  “Then Tobias and I will go.”

“That doesn’t solve who will stay here,” I said.

I was thinking about what Jake had said, _never point a gun at something you’re not willing to destroy._  They were willing all right, if it came to that.  Thing was, I was pretty sure they’d be _more_ willing in my case. Chapman had all-but said it: zombies were disposable.  Jake would probably make them regret shooting me, if it came to that, but I’d still be dead.

"Fine,  _somebody_ borrows the transmitter,  _somebody_ stays put."  Jake glanced at the door, dropping his voice further.  "That still doesn't tell us how we get two extra people out past the Gleet BioFilter."

“Oh, _that_.”  I smiled.  “Easy as pie.  In fact, I’m disappointed you guys didn’t figure it out years ago.”


	8. Never Underestimate

"No," Eva said flatly. "He'll never underestimate you again. That's over."

— _The Answer_ p. 14

 

Sure enough, when I walked through the BioFilter ten minutes later, it gave a single all-clear beep, only registering one life form.

The soldier who had been guarding the door turned around sharply at the sound, stiffening at the sight of me.  “Sir, you can’t be out here.”

I coughed into my hand but then looked up, straightening my chin to meet his gaze.  “I need to call my parents.”  I dropped my hand to my side.  “Just on a phone.”

“That really isn’t going to be possible, sir,” the soldier said.  He wasn’t one I’d seen outside before, or at least not one I remembered.

I started walking down the hallway like I knew I could be there, hand cupped loosely at my side.  The two shapes inside my fist were wet—and grumbling—but they were both moving, so they’d survive and get over it.

"Sorry, but I really do need to call,” I said.  "Just to let them know we're okay."

The soldier jogged a few paces to catch up with me.  At least he hadn’t yet tried grabbing me and physically dragging me back to the conference room.  "I'm sorry, but no."

“We’re all going to have more problems if I _don’t_ let them know where I am than if I just drop them a quick call.”  I tried to emulate Jake’s firm, confident tone.  “At the time when we left, I told them my brother and I would be gone for a few hours at most.  It’s been almost an entire day at this point.  They have to be worried already, and since we’re all still under quarantine, it’s going to be a while longer.”

We were almost all of the way down the hall now, approaching the communications room at the far end.  I was already walking as quickly as I could while trying to make it look natural, quashing the nearly-overwhelming urge to turn and look back at the soldier behind me to see whether he’d drawn his gun yet.

“You can listen in on the call the whole time if you want,” I said.  “Would that make you happy?”

As I rounded the corner the soldier caught up with me, stepping in front of me to block my way.  "Quarantine procedures exist for a reason, Mr. Berenson, and by necessity they include forbidding outside contact.  I'm sorry."

Apparently I didn't warrant a "General." I gave him a narrow-eyed stare, wishing I knew Jake's trick for looking wearily unamused when someone else was bullshitting him.  "I should let you know, they _will_ call the cops if we don't contact them soon."

"That's a risk we're willing to take." The guy didn't budge.  Then again, he also didn’t sound that confident.

“Your little communications hub is just down there, right?”  I spoke too loudly, gesturing with my right hand over the guy’s shoulder.  He flinched, but he also missed the small tossing motion I made in the process.

“Please.”  He swallowed, looking me over.  “If you’ll just return to the room, I’ll, uh, I’ll talk to someone about the potential for a monitored outside communication.”

“Is that really the best you can do?” I said.  Ugh, had that come off too pissy?

<Okay,> Jake said.  <We're in.>

I grinned.  Perfect.

The soldier was staring at me in polite confusion.

I wheeled around, walking back toward the room.  "If you guys have SWAT teams busting down your front door in a few hours, don't blame me," I called as I went.

The soldier, clearly unwilling to let me out of sight, jogged a few steps to follow me back down the hallway.  "Just wait where you are until we've resolved the crisis.”

"Yeah, yeah, okay."  I sighed, walking back into the conference room with slumped shoulders.

Cassie, who was waiting inside, glanced over at me.  "All good?"

“Think so,” I said aloud.  <I’m probably never going to wash the taste of houseflies out of my mouth, but I’ll live,> I added silently.

It was kinda necessary, after all.

Cassie smiled faintly.  “Okay.”

I sat down with my back to the guard at the door, facing Cassie.  And then, _very_ slowly, I started to demorph.

"Sorry they wouldn't let you call," she said, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

"Yeah, they're being a real pain about all this," I said loudly.  And then, in private thought-speak, <If the guy at the door starts looking like he noticed anything, say something about calling your own parents.>

Cassie nodded.  "I guess they have to do what they have to do.  I remember this one case that I got wrapped up in where there were local protests in D.C. over a police action against these Humans First terrorists..."

She kept rambling, providing cover as I focused on the slowest morph of my life.  We could only hope the guard wouldn't notice as I grew two inches taller over the course of the next five minutes, as my hair shortened and the structure of my shoulders and nose shifted just slightly.  Jake and I looked enough alike, especially from behind, that the guard could have watched the entire process and not noticed a thing.

So we hoped, anyway.

Marco was right, that everyone was focused on Jake right now, but also that he’d be the one most likely to get away with pushing the rules without getting shot.  He was also right, that fly morph was the best way to sneak into the communications room without getting noticed or shot—and that I had no fly morph, whereas Cassie was liable to go all mind-meldy when the mirrorwave thing started.  So that meant Jake and Cassie had to stay here, and Jake and Tobias had to make the call.

Ergo, we just had to put Jake in two places at once.

I finished demorphing, still nodding along like I was listening to Cassie at all.  She was carefully watching the guy at the door in her peripheral vision.  He didn’t have a clear view of the entire room, but it was only a matter of time before he figured out that there were only two people left in here.

“Will we know when the call happens?” I asked.

Cassie nodded.  “I’ll definitely know.  Not sure if you’ll hear anything or not.”  She took a deep breath.  “Um, just warning you, I might faint.  I should still be fine, but—”

As it turned out, she didn’t have to tell me.  It hit me like a psychic freight train.

The message slammed through my brain.  The room around disappeared in an explosion of color and sound, hawk vision and hearing overwhelming my own pathetic senses.  Emotion and thought jumbled together all at once.  First was a string of names, or impressions of names—

 _AxAximiliWar-Prince_ _Aximili-Esgarrouth-IsthillAx-ManCaptainIntrepidfrienduncleshorm—_

overlaid with an image of Ax’s face.  Then I was flying, moving in fast-forward speeds over the California coast, swooping inwards over the woods, a long dive that felt blindingly fast over Death Valley straight across the California border into the Nevada woods.  The trees skimmed by, the road a snaking ribbon below, and then the vision flashed into the clearing, circling around to give an overhead view of the Skrit Na crash and its surrounding fence of temporary military structures.  All the while Tobias’s thought-speak voice continued:

_—helpalientribbleSkritNaAirForceNevadasickillnesstribbledeathbiteskinhavetohelpusMarcofindAximilicure—_

The long scroll showing our location switched abruptly to a series of flashes—the dead Na, the rotting yeerks, the tribble in Marco’s hands, the human bodies, the tribble, the bite marks, back to the tribble.  I was cut off from my body, drifting, but I still felt the nauseous surge of vertigo as the too-fast 3D scroll continued.  I saw a flash of myself through a hawk-eye view, pulling Marco off of Jake, and then the vision showed Marco getting paler, Marco scratching at his arm, Marco morphing and the bite marks disappearing, and then back to the tribble again.

There was an enormous rushing sensation.  Like I was falling through thick water, plummeting into black depths.  Like everything was zooming past while my consciousness dragged behind.  The world went away.

********************

I woke up with my face mashed against the floor, awkwardly crumpled to one side where I had fallen over while sitting cross-legged on the ground.  There was grey plastic flooring in front of my eyes, and my right leg was prickling painfully from lack of blood.

Where the hell was I?  Why hadn’t any of my limbs moved yet?

The answer to that second question made its sluggish way through my brain: I had opened my own eyes.  Nothing in my body was going to move unless I moved it myself.

There were still brilliant rainbow lights dancing at the edges of my vision, and the world seemed to be peering back at me through a tunnel, but everything was rapidly moving my way.  The Skrit Na ship.  The tribble-thing.  The message.  Yeah.

I blinked, slowly pulling my right arm to my side and planting that hand on the floor to push myself upright.  I grimaced when I realized I’d been drooling on the floor.  There was noise happening in the background—

“You saw it too?” The guard at the door was babbling into his walkie-talkie.  “I’m telling you, as soon as my vision did that weird thing, they both passed out.  Should I go in there?”

Slowly orienting myself, I braced my hand against the floor and pushed myself back into a sitting position.

I glanced around.  Cassie was slumped in a similarly awkward position.  I tried to push myself to my feet, almost tipped over, and settled for crawling over to her.

Even as I reached her she was blinking and starting to stretch.

“How long were we out?” I asked Marco, voice hoarse.

He coughed.  “Thirty seconds?”

I blinked a few times.  It had felt like hours, like I was struggling to come awake from the deepest sleep of my life.

Cassie was stirring, starting to move her limbs and open her eyes.  She squinted at me for a second or two as if trying to remember who I was.

“Y’all right?” I asked.

She squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again.  She shoved her arms under her, pushing herself to a sitting position—and almost went clear over the other way.  I grabbed her arm, keeping her upright.

“Ugh,” she said.

“Same.”  I didn’t have a headache the way I half-expected I would after that experience, but I was still nauseous and my limbs were leaden with exhaustion.

That actually got Cassie to focus on me more.  “You passed out too?”

“Yep.  Just woke up.”

She rubbed a hand over her hair—like me, she kept it as short as possible to avoid having to mess with it—and frowned like I’d said something wrong.

“Guess it worked, though.”  My head had cleared enough that I decided to risk standing up.  The process took longer than it should have, and involved some more embarrassing wobbling, but at least at the end of it I was upright.  I walked shakily over to the wall we shared with Marco.

He was sitting down on the floor, bandaged arm cradled to his chest.  I was pretty sure he’d gotten even paler since the last time I’d looked.

“You okay?” I called.

He cracked another one of those horrible morbid smiles, which looked even more ghastly given his pallor and the sweat standing out against his skin.  “I think that depends on what you mean.”

If he wasn’t already dying and if his mother wasn’t a wonderful human being who nonetheless scared the crap out of me, I probably would have already reached the end of my rope and beyond with him.  As it was, I found the patience to say, “Did you faint?”

“Nope.”  His voice was becoming steadily quieter.  “Got the whole bird-boy-brain acid trip, but unlike you two I kept my marbles.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing.”  Cassie had stood up, and came over to stand next to me.  “You shouldn’t have reacted that much to the message.  Not unless you were an est—”

The conference room door slammed open.  “Three targets secure,” the guy from earlier snapped into his walkie-talkie.  “Repeat, three targets secure, two not secure.”

“Which two?” the voice on the other end asked.

The guy looked at me, opened his mouth, and shut it again.  “I’m not sure,” he said at last.

The walkie-talkie buzzed.  “What do you mean you’re not...?  Oh, _shit_.”

The guy at the door looked from me to Cassie and back.  “St-stay where you are.”

I would have been amused by how high-pitched his voice had gotten, except for the fact that he was armed and could always shoot us if he got too nervous.

Cassie held up her hands, placating.  “We’re not going anywhere.”

“They were in the communication hub!” It was a voice from down the hall.

“What did they do?”

“Did they steal anything?”

“Did anybody else see...?"

“What were those weird flashes?”

“Find them—”

“—but who is it?”

“What was that—?”

“Get the other two!”

From there everyone was yelling over each other enough that I couldn’t catch any individual words.

“Stay where you are!” the guy at the door blurted again.  He waved vaguely at Cassie and I like he was half-heartedly telling us to sit down, and then he ran out of the room.

“I’m guessing they got caught,” I said dryly.

Cassie shrugged.  “That’s okay.  It worked.  Obviously.”

The guy who had been guarding us showed no signs of coming back.  Cassie walked past me and out the door of the room.  I followed her into the hallway, hoping we weren’t about to get our dumb asses shot.

The group of soldiers bustling toward us down the hallway had Jake and Tobias in tow, and everyone was still shouting over one another.  Two of the soldiers were holding Jake between them; a third carried Tobias in his arms.  Jake was making no attempt to morph or get away, but that didn’t stop them from dragging him roughly toward our cell by their death-grip on both his arms.

The government official charged down the hallway from the other direction.  She didn’t stop until she was almost nose-to-nose with Jake.  “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done, you idiot child?” she demanded.

Jake didn’t answer.  The expression on his face suggested she was standing in front of a screen he was trying to watch and he had no interest in her existence outside of hoping she would move soon.

“Answer me!”

He didn’t.

“Look,” Cassie said, walking slowly toward the woman with her hands held at waist level.  “I know that we’re all a little tense right now, but I’m sure he’s very sorry and won’t do it again—"

“Shut your mouth, girl,” the government official snapped.

That got Jake to make eye contact with the government woman at last.  “Leave her alone,” he said coldly.

“You listen to me.”  The woman turned back to Jake.  “This situation has gotten completely out of hand.  You just blasted classified information from a top-secret operation to half the population of the West Coast!  What do you have to say for yourself?”

He immediately slid his eyes sideways, making a show of no longer paying attention.

I had seen him play this game before, with Essa 412, with Visser Three, with andalite princes and hordes of taxxons.  No amount of threatening or begging was going to get him to start dancing to their tune.

I could feel myself shaking.  The kid was all steel and fire inside, but god could he _ever_ make a bad situation worse when he was being stubborn.

“Okay, okay,” Cassie said smoothly.  “We’re all going to calm down, okay?”

“Fine with me.”  Jake actually smiled at her.  “Because in a couple hours the whole world is going to know that these people are spineless, two-faced, lying—“

 _Crack_.

Jake’s head jerked back, his left cheek already darkening to red.  The woman shook out her hand, grimacing.

Cassie grabbed my arm before I could lunge forward.  My vision had gone red.  That—  She dared—  The whole world was grey with my anger.  And it was becoming steadily brighter.  

“ _Giselle_!”  That one had been Captain Nasland, pushing through his soldiers toward the government official.  “What the hell are you doing?”

The government woman (Giselle, apparently) was staring Jake down, chest heaving.  “This boy just announced to the entire state that there is an alien ship here, and managed to slander all of us in the process, William,” she said through clenched teeth.

Captain Nasland crossed his arms.  “That’s no excuse for assaulting a civilian.”

Giselle barked a laugh.  “ _Civilian_?”  

“It doesn’t matter anyway.”  Jake lifted his head, looking from one of them to the other.  “Admit it: you can’t control us.  We will do what we need to, and there is no way you can stop us.”

“We can try,” the woman said.  And then she pulled the dracon beam off her belt and shot him in the chest.


	9. What You Need

"You can't always get what you want. But If you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need." A famous human named Rolling Stones said that. I thought it was very wise, for a human.

— Ax, _The Alien_ p. 141

 

Jake slumped forward against the soldiers’ hold, unconscious immediately.

“Now,” Giselle said stiffly, smoothing back her hair.  “Does anyone else want to—“

That was all she had time to say before I slammed her to the floor and locked my teeth around her throat.

The jaguar morph was still finishing even as I pinned her, a growl of primal rage vibrating in my throat.  She screamed, twisting and trying to throw me off.

I snarled, releasing her throat to bare four-inch canines, and she stopped moving.  Good.  The claws I had just grown slid out of their sheaths and straight into the skin of the human’s shoulders.  Fabric tore, and flesh underneath.

I would _kill_ the mewling prey-thing.  I would spill its blood and break its bones.  I would make it pay for what it had done.  I reveled in the feeling of its skin parting under my claws.  I dug in deeper, widening the slashes until my claws met bone.  

It made another squealing noise, to the jaguar’s delight.  The cat mind loved playing with its food.  This kill would last, and we would enjoy every second.

Now was the time to taste its blood as I took its sins out of its flesh.  It was the enemy and I was the hunter.  It would learn what happened when it crossed me.  I would tear its flesh off piece by piece until it stopped struggling.  I would rip its meat away from the bone, and I would swallow.

I would—

An enormous bladed arm caught me around my middle just as I was about to bite down.  The hork-bajir dragged me backwards, shoving me away from the fight.

I twisted away from those blades, dodging around the hork-bajir’s grasp to lunge at the human again.  Tobias moved faster than I expected, once again throwing himself between me and my prey.

<Stop!>  He was yelling.  <Tom, get ahold of yourself, and get control of that morph!>

 _What_?  I was in control.  I could move, I could breathe, I could kill the prey-thing just as soon as the strange creature got out of my way...

Oh.

I sat down abruptly, my claws retracting.

Tobias continued to watch me warily, not moving from where he blocked my access to Giselle, who was being helped to her feet by a couple soldiers.  She had her right hand clamped over the gory mess of her opposite shoulder, left arm dangling limp at her side as blood sluiced between her fingers.  There was more blood trickling from the shallow teeth-marks on her throat.

I breathed in slowly, looking away from her, wishing I couldn’t smell the blood quite so clearly.  I’d always thought that losing control of a morph would be like losing control of my body.  I hadn’t realized how subtle it could be, how my emotions and the jaguar’s instincts could meld so smoothly I couldn’t tell them apart.

Cassie was crouched next to Jake on the floor, holding his limp body half-upright.  The sight of those two grounded me, brought me back.

The guy who had been holding Tobias was white-faced, staring at the newly-materialized hork-bajir with an expression that suggested he knew _exactly_ how close he had just come to being turned into mincemeat.  Good thing Tobias knew how to be more careful in morph than I did; I didn’t even see a scratch on the guy.

For a second we were all frozen that way, no sound except for Giselle’s breathing, harsh with pain.  I realized belatedly that there were about forty guns pointed at my head.  Tobias had just saved my life.

“Get in there.”  Captain Nasland became the one to break the silence, jerking a hand toward the door of the observation room.  “All of you.  Now.  And _stay put."_

Tobias gently scooped Jake off the floor, backing through the door.  He left me a clear path for attack in the process, but I was level-headed enough not to try again.  Barely.

Cassie gave me a pointed look, and waited until I had gone through the door before she followed me.

I demorphed.  It took effort.  I was still blindingly angry.  Wanted to tear all their throats out.  Knew it would be that much harder to kill them as a human.  But I could still do it.  I knew how to kill bare-handed, or at least my body knew.

Better still, if all of us morphed, if we all attacked at once... We could probably do it.  Spill their blood.  Crack their bones.  Make them pay.  Show them their power was an illusion.  Show them what happened when they fucked with us.  We could tear their bodies apart.  Smash their precious weapons.  We could _kill_.

Jake wouldn’t approve.

Jake was unconscious on the floor.

I was pacing back and forth even before I was fully human.  I wanted to tear down the walls.  Wanted to bash their heads in.

They could shoot us, could even try to kill us.  However, as the yeerk empire had figured out a long time ago, that wasn’t much of a threat against a morph-capable group of reckless kids.  On the other hand...

“They’re panicked.”  Cassie spoke loudly enough that I knew she was directing it as much at the guy guarding our room as at me.  “They’re desperate, and they’re reacting, and so they’re being incredibly stupid right now.  As soon as they put a call through to their superiors, cooler heads up top will prevail.  And when that happens...”  She looked straight at the guard, anger distorting her own expression.  “Heads around here are going to roll.”

I didn’t think she meant that in the literal sense.  Which was a shame.  I never thought I’d actually approve of Visser Three’s disciplinary methods, but these assholes had _shot Jake_.  And they were sitting around with their thumbs up their asses watching Marco die.

“The message got out,” Cassie spoke more quietly, but her voice was firm.  “They can’t do anything about that now.  It’s already out there.  Enough people know.”

I knew she was trying to calm me down as much as anything.  Right about now it made me want to punch her.  I wanted to hold onto my anger.  It made me feel less helpless.

Not that punching her would accomplish anything.  But I couldn’t punch the people responsible for this mess.  Couldn’t even tell them what I thought of them without risking another overreaction.  It was brutally simple: they were being short-sighted, selfish, and cowardly, but while they remained better-armed than us they would continue to have all the power.  Law of the jungle.  Give in or get killed.

I took a deep breath.  Let it out slowly.  Unfurled the fist my right hand had clenched into automatically.

At least I could call them selfish, cowardly worms inside my own head without anyone punishing me for it.  Silver linings, right?

“It’ll be okay,” Cassie whispered.  “It’ll be okay.”

Jake was still unconscious, curled on the floor.  Cassie had pulled his head into her lap and stroked his hair gently as she spoke, like he was an injured animal in need of comfort.  Then again, judging by the almost compulsive way she repeated the motion, maybe he wasn’t the one who needed comforting.

<What do we do now?> Tobias asked.

“We wait.  They’re going to have no choice but to contact their superiors.  The big wigs will probably recommend sending a second, more official message to the andalites.  Probably a cover-our-butts apology, and an invitation for them to come help out the clueless humans who meant to call them all along and just forgot up until now.”  Cassie kept petting Jake.  “I don’t know if that will work in our favor first, or if Ax will be able to send someone here first.  Either way, the cat’s out of the bag.  Help is on its way, one way or another.”

I looked away from her, toward Marco.  He was slumped against the far wall of his room, staring in our general direction with unfocused eyes.  His skin was a horrifying shade of greyish green that I’d never seen on a human being before.  The trembling had stopped, and he wasn’t pacing around anymore.  The only sign he wasn’t already dead was the way his chest heaved up every time he took in a breath, like working his lungs took more effort each time he inhaled.  He was wearing out.  Winding down.

“It might... Might take a little while.”  Cassie swallowed to steady her voice.  “But help is coming.  Someone will be here, sooner rather than...”

Rather than too late.

She didn’t fake hopeful self-confidence nearly as well as Jake did.

“It doesn’t have to be Ax,” I pointed out.  Mostly because both she and Tobias looked so miserable and afraid.  “Assuming you did it right, half the morph-capable humans and all of the andalites on the West Coast just got your message.  Any one of them could get here a lot faster.”

<Right,> Tobias said bitterly.  <Since random calls for help always work _so_ well.  Which is why yelling for help if you’re about to get mugged in the middle of the city always results in every single person within earshot immediately dropping what they’re doing to run over and fight off your attacker as fast as they possibly can. >

“Most of the humans who heard owe you guys their lives, their freedom,” I reminded him.  “And the andalites on Earth are mostly tourists.  Not as likely to be so caught up in their military’s Prime Directive.”

<Not as likely to have information that can actually help us, either.>

I gave up.  We were both pissed off, but picking a fight wouldn’t help either of us feel better.

“Could they at least give him an oxygen tank?” Cassie whispered, still staring at Marco.  “Or something to...  To make him more comfortable?”

My stomach turned over at the last word.   Comfortable.  It was something they did for people who were waiting to die.  Made them comfortable.

Marco was still fighting for every breath, ribs forcing themselves outward to drag more air in, collapsing gratefully in on themselves on the exhale.   My own chest hurt just from watching him.

Maybe Cassie was right.

<So that’s it, then?> Tobias demanded.  <You’re giving up on him?>

Cassie’s eyes widened.  “You know I didn’t mean—”

Jake suddenly gasped and started coughing, his eyes popping open.  His left hand flailed around wildly until it found Cassie’s arm and clung on.  “Di’ th’mission go ‘kay?” he slurred, squinting at her and trying to sit up.  “‘re we all okay?”

“Jake?” I said cautiously.

His head whipped around.  He stared at me with wide eyes, all the blood draining out of his face.  One hand came up as if to fend off a blow.

“It’s two-thousand-one,” Cassie said quickly.  “There wasn’t a mission, just a favor to the military.  The downed Skrit Na ship.  The alien virus.  Marco’s still fighting that off, but you and Tobias sent for help.  It’s going to be okay.”

I could tell the moment her words sunk in, because Jake stopped looking at me like I was about to attack him.  Stopped looking at me entirely, instead dropping his eyes as he realized what he’d just done.

“Why’s my head feel like it’s about to explode?” Jake asked into the floor.

“That bottom-feeding sack of shit—”

<You got shot with a dracon beam,> Tobias said over me.  Which was admittedly more concise than the way I would have phrased it.

Jake pressed a hand against his temple.  “Yeah, that’s—”  He stopped, catching sight of Marco.

“We’re gonna get help soon,” Cassie said quietly.

Jake stood up, swaying a little but keeping his feet.  He slid open the door to the conference room and walked through the Gleet BioFilter.

The soldier at the door stiffened.  “Sir—”

“I’m going in there,” Jake informed the man.

“I can’t let you—”

Jake stared the man down, calm and confident like he hadn’t just been unconscious on the floor seconds ago.  “If he tries to attack me, I should have no trouble fighting him off right now.  And if he does succeed in biting me, you can always just lock the door and leave me in there.  I am going in there, one way or another.”

The soldier didn’t argue.  Jake didn’t exactly leave him any room to do so.

Marco didn’t look up when the door to his room slid open.  But when Jake crouched down directly in front of him, he focused enough to make eye contact.

“Hey, man,” Jake said, offering up a tiny smile.  “How you holding up?”

Marco’s answer was too quiet for me to hear, for which I was grateful.  I turned away from them, trying to block out Jake’s half of the conversation as well.

They spoke quietly to each other for a while.  The rest of us did our best not to hear and tried to look like we had anything to do other than wait around for rescue or for the worst to happen.

Jake’s voice suddenly got louder.  “I’m not going to be telling your parents anything,” he said.  “Because—hey, look at me—because you’re going to be fine.  You hear me?  Couple hours from now you’re going to be good as new, and...”

Marco must have said something else, because he cut off.

Jake listened for a while, and then said, “I’m holding you to that.  But you can call your mom yourself, when all this is over.”

I glared at the wall, an irrational surge of rage at Marco hot in my gut.  How dare he put this kind of burden on Jake?  How dare he saddle someone he claimed to care about with his last dying moments?  And if that little bastard even _thought_ about going and dying on Jake when Jake had already lost so damn much, I was about ready to strangle him myself.

He and the others disgusted me.  Why couldn’t they seem to wrap their heads around the fact that Jake was just a kid, no more special than any of them?  They kept right on dumping their burdens, their pain, their crap, all over him.  And they just expected him to be supportive.  To sit there and take it, and hold their hands.  Like he was supposed to be their goddamn parent.

Were they all stupid, or were they just being willfully blind?  How dare Marco be in pain.  How dare he expect Jake to be supportive, after everything Jake had already done.

I hated him.  And the thought that Rachel might have had this _exact same conversation_ with Jake made me hate her too.

How dare they hurt Jake like this, by going and dying.  They sickened me.

I laced my hands together, breathing slowly. _I_ _didn’t mean any of that, not really_ , I thought.  And then I realized I’d thought it _at_ Essa 412.  I flinched.

Tobias glanced over at the motion.  I turned away, not answering his implied question.  I wasn’t about to announce to everyone present that I still sometimes found myself talking to the little voice in my head that didn’t even exist anymore.

“Marco?” Jake said sharply.

I stood up.  Cassie did the same.  Marco had slumped over suddenly, eyes falling shut.

Jake pressed a hand to Marco’s neck for a few seconds.  He must have felt a pulse, because he started gently shaking Marco’s arm.  “C’mon.  Marco!  Marco, get up!”

There was no response.

After another long moment, Jake gave up, shoulders dropping.  He leaned forward and for a second I was afraid he was going to slump over on top of Marco, but instead he slid one arm under Marco’s shoulders and the other under his knees.  He straightened up, carrying Marco like a little kid, and staggered over to the bed.

Jake set Marco on his side on top of the crumpled sheets, sliding a pillow under his head.  Jake straightened the sheets, fussed with the bedspread, pushed Marco’s long hair off his face, adjusted the pillow.  And then he ran out of useless little motions and just... stopped.  Stared into space.  Arms limp, shoulders slumped.  Defeated.  Waiting for the next blow to fall.

He stayed like that for another few seconds.  Just watching Marco.  He shook his head, visibly pasting his game face back on.  He looked up at the soldier at the door.

The guy opened the door for Jake without any further objections.  But when Jake walked into the hallway he stiffened his spine and said, “Sir—”

Jake looked directly at him.

“It was never meant to get this far, sir,” the soldier said.

“If he dies,” Jake said calmly, and with absolute honesty, “I will burn this place to the ground.  I will kill your commanding officer in cold blood.  And if given no other choice, I will kill anyone who tries to stop me from doing so.”

The soldier swallowed hard.  “I-if you d-do, they’ll execute you for murder.  Doesn’t matter who you are.”

“Yes, that’s probably true.”  Jake shrugged.  “But I’ll have earned it.  I’m already a mass murderer.  A war criminal.  What I did to that yeerk pool was genocide.  This would just be cleaning house.”

It took the guy a few seconds to muster enough courage to open his mouth again.  By the time he did, Jake was already back inside our cell.

“Won’t be much longer before help gets here,” Cassie said gently.

Jake didn’t seem to hear her.  He walked past us into the room, stopping with his face pointing toward the wall we shared with Marco.  His eyes weren’t focused on the far room, but on something inside his head.

“Midget...?” I touched him on the arm.

Jake looked at me like I was the final problem on an Algebra test.  And then his eyes slid away, drawn back to where Marco lay.

I dropped my hand.

Cassie glanced at me, biting her lip, and then back at Jake.

He wasn’t going to let anything out.  Not here.  Not in front of Cassie and Tobias and the soldier at the door.  Not where Marco could potentially see him.  If it was just me and him here, or probably just him and Cassie, it’d be a different story.  But he refused to let himself be human in front of his team.

Instead, he held tight to that thread holding him upright.  He fought for that mask of blankness, because he didn’t have the willpower left for anything else.  He was clinging by his teeth to the facade, I knew, stuffing the pain into the battlement of his steady knees and dry eyes.

But if he snapped now, he wasn’t going to break down.  He was going to explode.

“Jake.”  It was Tobias who spoke.

I turned around, eyes widening in surprise; I hadn’t even noticed him morphing to human.

Jake actually came back to the present enough to turn and focus on Tobias.  If I had already figured out that Tobias only became human when he had something important to say, then Jake had to have noticed years ago.

“It’ll be just a little while longer now,” Tobias said.  “You’ve already done everything you can for him.  And he knows that.  And so do we.  You’ve already carried us this far, but we need you to keep going for just a little while longer.  Just long enough to be sure it all goes smoothly when whoever Ax sends gets here.  Can you do that for us?”

Jake shuddered in a huge gulp of air.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I can.  If...”  His eyes drifted away from Tobias, back to Marco.  “If it comes to that.”

In other words, if Marco made it that long.

“If it doesn’t?”  Tobias took a step too close to Jake, crowding into his personal space.  Forcing Jake to pay attention to him.  “Then that is _not_ on you.  That’s not on Marco, or on any one of us.  That is on the dumb jerks running this place, and it is on the stupid space-virus that decided to come here and deserves to get killed.  Not on you.  Not even a little.”

Jake took a step back.  His expression had gone hard again.  “I get it.  You think _this one_ is not my fault.  No need to spell it out.”

Tobias lifted his chin.  “No, I don’t think you do.  First of all, I know what I know, and don’t you dare dismiss that as me _thinking_ I have an opinion on the subject.  Second...”

No one breathed during the pause he took to get his thoughts together.  I don’t know what was going through Tobias’s mind.  My thoughts were mostly focused on the question of how fast I could get over there if he started throwing punches.

“Rachel.”  Tobias had to stop again after saying her name, but he kept going when Jake didn’t try to cut him off.  “She made her own choice.  And...”  The first tear spilled down his cheek.  He ignored it.  “She died for what she believed in.  And god only knows...”  He laughed wetly.  “That she never did anything you asked unless she thought it was a good idea herself.  And I need to learn to accept that.”

Jake was swaying where he stood, just a little.  I don’t think he was consciously aware he was doing it.

Tobias sniffed.  “So, uh, this is me spelling it out: We all chose to get involved in this war.  We all knew how it might end.  You’re not our dad.  And you’re definitely not a god.  So I can’t take away what she did by putting it on you.  And neither can you.  Marco’s not on you, and.”  He swallowed.  “And neither is she.”

Jake’s knees gave out.  He threw out a hand to catch himself on the wall—and Tobias got there first, grabbing him by the arm.  “I’m not...”  Jake lowered his head.  “I don’t...”

“Just a little while longer, man,” Tobias said, catching his forearms to hold him up.  “We just need you to keep going for a little while longer.”

It wasn’t what I would have said to him.  Probably not what Cassie would have said either.  But then what Tobias had just done wouldn’t have meant anything coming from either of us, so it was a moot point.  And it was what Jake needed to hear right now: that he was needed.  That he had a reason to keep it together.

“Yeah.  Yeah, okay.”  Jake was staring at Tobias like he didn’t quite know what to do next, but his voice was steady again.  “I can do that.”

“Good.”  Tobias actually smiled.  “What’s a pearl-handled pistol without General Patton?”

Jake laughed, and then glanced over at Marco as if Marco was going to see and disapprove.  “You actually remember that?” he said.

“It was what I needed at the time, and you knew it.”  Tobias let him go, taking a step back but still hovering.

“You know I just make this crap up as I go along, right?” Jake said dryly.

“That’s what—”  Tobias broke off.  He wasn’t looking at Jake anymore.

I turned to follow the direction of his gaze.  There was a different soldier watching the door now.  No, not a soldier, I realized, and that must have been what drew his attention.

“Oh my god,” Tobias whispered.

The woman standing on the other side of the glass door was dressed in civilian clothes, a tight grey dress over black leggings and ballet flats.  She was strikingly attractive, her big blue eyes contrasting with her tanned skin and the thick dark hair she wore swept into a high ponytail.  But that probably wasn’t the reason Tobias was staring at her with wide eyes, a smile just starting to break over his face.

The woman raised her eyebrows at Tobias, leaning against the door frame.  “You called?”


	10. This is Earth (2)

Jake glanced at each of us, ran his hand through his hair.

"This is . . ." He cleared his throat. He glanced back at Ax and smiled. Then he leaned in close to the device.

"This is Earth," he said.

— _The Revelation_ p. 136

 

"How did you get in here?" Tobias asked.

 _And who the hell are you?_ I added mentally.  Jake and Cassie looked just as confused as I felt.

The woman waved a card—presumably some kind of ID—before dismissively tucking it back into her sleeve.  <Aria Michaels is a certified _Scientific American_ photographer with a full set of press credentials and a documented history of working with alien species.  The background check will even come up clean.>

I jerked in surprise, because I knew that voice.

“Prince Alloran,” Jake said softly.

<Prince Jake.>  He nodded briefly.  <They were expecting a press reaction, so I gave them one.  Now that the idiots guarding this place are out of sight of this form's apparently attractive components, at least some of their brains are probably going to turn back on enough to wonder how I got here so quickly without a car.>

I nodded, looking very closely at his eyes and nowhere else.  Definitely not looking at the scary dangerous genocidal alien who had like eighty different morphs that could eat me and oh god _why_ had I already noticed that he wasn’t wearing a bra?  What was wrong with my stupid hormonal brain?

“Can you help?” Tobias asked.

In response, Alloran gestured us into the hallway, already walking toward Marco’s room. <Judging from your message, you encountered a juvenile _irliedaff_ that had been infected with the _lotemric_ ,> he said.  <For a morph-capable human, it should be easy enough to fix.  You’ll need to inflict a shallow cut using a piece of the carbonite heat shield from the Skrit Na ship—>

“That’ll kill him!” Cassie blurted.

Alloran nodded, ponytail bobbing.  <Yes.  But first it will kill the _lotemric_ microorganisms.  And it needs to be done in the form in which he was infected, because as you have no doubt already discovered, _lotemric_ is a z-space grounded infection that is not affected by morphing.>

“But if he morphs, that will get rid of the heavy metal poisoning?” Jake said.

<Exactly, Prince Jake.>

Jake twitched like he was going to say something about the title, but ultimately all he said was, “Okay, so we poison him, wait for the poison to kill this, uh, loteric thing, and then have him morph to get rid of the poison?”

“You can’t be here.”

We all turned.  Sergeant Grace was standing at the end of the hallway.  He didn’t seem to know what to do, but he was staring at Alloran with a somewhat dazed expression.  “Ma’am, you can’t be back here,” he continued.

Alloran smiled coyly, holding out his hand.  “Aria Michaels, _Scientific American_ magazine.  I’m here documenting the new alien-human contact.”

“That’s fine, but this part of the base is not supposed to be accessible to press,” Sergeant Grace said.  “And we need to detain these individuals until we can be sure it’s safe to lift the quarantine procedures.  So I’m going to have to ask you to leave."

Alloran’s smile took on a more dangerous edge.  “No."

Sergeant Grace was steadily walking toward us.  “I’m sorry?”

Alloran crossed his arms under his breasts in a way that distracted my inner moron.  “I am not leaving.”

Sergeant Grace grabbed the walkie-talkie off his belt.  “Lieutenant Clearwater, we have a situation here in the infirmary room, civilian presence here, targets are not secure, not sure what—”

That was when Alloran gave up all pretense.  His long hair melted away into short blue fur as he grew taller and taller, extra limbs—legs, eyes, tail—spouting out of the body that still had mostly human skin.  As Sergeant Grace’s eyes got wider and wider, Alloran finished demorphing and stepped lightly down the hallway toward him, hooves clicking on the plastic floor.

<I am not here to cause anyone harm,> he said.  <These human children asked for a favor, and I intend to deliver it.  After that, I will be on my way.>

“Please stop morphing.”  Sergeant Grace’s voice shook.  “And, um...”  His eyes skittered from Alloran’s tail blade, to his face, and then back to the tail.  At least the guy had some sense, then.  “Um, stay where you are.”

Sergeant Grace reached for the gun on his belt.  Alloran’s tail twitched.  Sergeant Grace dropped his hand.

“Should we, like, do something?” I asked in a whisper.

Jake shook his head.

Apparently Sergeant Grace’s call had gotten out, because within seconds another man ran into the hallway behind him—and also stopped, watching Alloran.  More and more joined him.  Slowly the hall filled with soldiers behind Sergeant Grace.  Most of them had their guns out.  None of them seemed to know what to do.

Finally Captain Nasland stepped into the hallway, clearing a path through the assembled troops.  “All right, sweetheart,” he said, hand on his gun. “I don't know who you are or where you came from, but we are escorting you off the premises immediately.”

Alloran didn't answer, except to tilt a single stalk eye consideringly at Captain Nasland.

“We can do this the easy way, or we can make your life extremely difficult very quickly.”  Captain Nasland jerked his head toward the door.  “Now let's go.”

<I am not leaving until I assist these humans,> Alloran said at last.

“You _are_ leaving, now, or else we will have no choice but to use force,” Captain Nasland snapped.

Alloran stared coldly at the group of soldiers for a long second.  And then he started melting.

His fur ran together into thick black sludge, hooves spreading outward as his body expanded, filling the entire hallway.  Where the black goo he was becoming touched the walls, they began to bubble and dissolve.  The holes grew, the reek of melting plastic filled the air.  The entire structure was sagging inward.

“St-stop that!” Sergeant Grace said.  “Stop or we’ll shoot!”

I stepped back several steps, throwing out an arm to drag Cassie and Tobias backwards with me.  Jake at least had the good sense to retreat from the toxic sludge on his own.

<Allow me to be perfectly clear,> Alloran said, maintaining his death-glare even as first one stalk eye and then the other disappeared into the ooze.  <I am not beholden to you.  You do not command me.>

The parts of him that had already turned into that tar-like substance were sprouting into tentacles.  Some were comparatively narrow but several yards long.  Others were over a foot thick and opened on taxxon-like mouths with hundreds of rows of needle teeth.  The thing he was becoming filled the hallway from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, and it was still expanding either direction down the corridor like gelatin in a tube.  All of us were now backing steadily away as he surged outward, and on the far side of the living tar pit I could see the soldiers doing the same.

<I am not human,> Alloran continued calmly.  <Nor do I care what power you may hold among the humans.  I am the Butcher of Hork-Bajir, the andalites’ Abomination.  I have been killing aliens since before the first yeerk crawled its way into one of Seerow’s ships.  I owe nothing to any being in this universe or any other... except for these human children.>  He pointed an almost delicate tentacle at the window of Marco’s room.  <I will kill as many aliens as necessary to protect them, because to them I owe far more than my life.  I owe the very choice to take a breath, to speak these words.  And though I can never repay that debt, I will do what it takes—>

 _BlamBlamBlam_!

Someone on the far end had decided to open fire.  I flinched, halfway afraid that the bullets would travel straight through all that goo and hit us.  Instead they impacted the surface of Alloran’s skin with soft plopping sounds and disappeared entirely.  They left no holes behind.  Alloran barely seemed to notice.

 _Tsseeewwww_!

Apparently dracon beams didn’t hurt him either.

<I would rather not kill anyone else.>  Alloran sounded like an exasperated parent talking to stubborn children.  <However, I _will_ eat as many of you as is necessary to convince the rest of you that what you need to do is find a piece of atmosphere-vacuum coated metal, bring it here, and then follow the rest of the Animorphs’ instructions without question. >

“He’s bluffing, right?” Cassie whispered.  “Please tell me he’s bluffing.”

“‘course he is.”  Jake sounded certain, not that that meant he was.  “He wouldn’t want to start an interspecies incident of that scale.  Not again.”

I was about 90% sure Alloran was putting on a front.  Okay, more like 50% sure.

The tar-octopus seethed into a different shape, and I caught a glimpse of the cluster of soldiers.  They were wide-eyed, white-faced.  Most had lowered their weapons.  Captain Nasland was standing so stiffly he looked like he was half a second from falling over.

“All right,” he said hoarsely.  He cleared his throat and spoke louder.  “I’m the one in charge here, and... there’s no need to eat anyone.  So please—please just demorph, and we’ll talk.  Okay?”

<You’ll do as Prince Jake commands?> Alloran said.

Jake cringed.  “They do know I’m not a _real_ war-prince, right?”

“Bullshit,” I murmured.

He shot me an annoyed look, which I ignored.

“Yes.”  Captain Nasland sounded like he was spitting the word out through a mouthful of broken teeth.  “Yes, we will.”

<Very good.>  Alloran started shrinking right away, probably as a show of good faith.  The black sludge shrank and solidified like play-dough slowly being molded into the shape of an andalite.  Slowly it sucked inward to four legs, two arms, a tail, and then finally shifted into muscle and skin and fur.

And then everyone from Alloran to Captain Nasland to Cassie was left looking expectantly at Jake.

“Um.”  Jake glanced around.  “Cassie, Tobias, morph hork-bajir and go hack a piece of heat shielding off that ship.  Don’t get cut.  Tom, come help me with Marco.  Everybody else...”  He shrugged.  “Stay put and don’t kill each other, okay?”

Alloran looked at Jake, stalk eyes still pointed at the soldiers.  He nodded slowly—and then winked.  Guy had spent entirely too much time on Earth.

Jake led the way into Marco’s hospital room.  I followed warily.  Marco certainly didn’t look like much of a threat—he was still asleep or unconscious, and disturbingly pale—but I wasn’t looking to get bitten and end up in a hospital bed next to him.

“Marco,” Jake said, soft but urgent.  “Marco, c’mon, wake up.  I really don’t want to be stabbing you in your sleep if I can avoid it.  And we’re gonna need you to morph in a little while here.”

Marco didn’t respond.

We didn’t have time for the gentle approach.  I poked him on the arm, hard.  That had no effect, so I shoved him a little.

His eyes snapped open and focused on me—and then on Alloran standing in the hallway, and then back on my face.

“Ah, shit,” I muttered, half a second before he started screaming.

“Get away from me!” Marco cried hoarsely.  He threw himself backward, recoiling from me so sharply he crashed into Jake on the other side of the bed.  “I’ll die!  YOU HEAR ME?  I’LL DIE BEFORE I LET YOU TAKE ME!”

“Shit,” I said again.

Jake was trying to talk him down, but Marco was hyperventilating, staring at me like...

Well, like I was Visser Seventeen.

I’d already taken several steps back, holding up my hands to look non-threatening.  Alloran had clearly done the same math as me, lowering his tail and stepping away from the door.  It didn’t seem to be doing any good.  Marco was wild-eyed with fever, caught in his own mind.

“You promised!”  Marco seized Jake’s arm.  There was more rasp than volume to his voice.  “You _promised_ me you’d kill me before you let them make me like her—”

“Marco!”  Jake caught Marco before he could fall out of the bed entirely.  “It’s okay.”

Marco suddenly yanked away from Jake, looking at him with new horror.  “No,” he croaked.  He shook his head, sweat-soaked hair sticking to his neck.  “ _No_.  No, no, not you too...”

“ _Shit_ ,” I said again.

Marco threw himself out of the bed entirely, hitting the floor with a painful-sounding thud.  He tried to push himself to his feet, collapsed, and instead started dragging himself away from me and Jake.  Any second now he was going to start morphing, and then we’d really be fucked.

“If we were all controllers, why wouldn’t we just infest you while you were unconscious?” I asked Marco.

Apparently this chain of thought required a little too much logic for his fever-addled state, because he just stared at me in silence.  And then he brought his hands up to cover his ears, shaking his head.  He dug his nails into his skin, scratching hard until he penetrated the skin.  “No, no, no, no...”

I grabbed his wrist and yanked it away from his face before he could damage himself any more.

Marco’s head jerked up.  “Get your filthy yeerk hands off me!”

I sighed.  “I am _so_ telling your mom you said that.”

Strangely enough, that was what got Marco to stop fighting me.  He blinked a few times, frowning as he struggled to process that statement.  Probably because it would be an utterly nonsensical thing for a controller to say.  He opened his mouth and then closed it, clearly trying to wrap his head around what the hell was happening here.

And then Cassie came charging back into the room, still in hork-bajir morph, Tobias perched on one of her horns.  <Got it.>  She held up a chunk of black metal.

<Marco?  Why are you on the floor?> Tobias asked.

Marco looked as though in that moment he didn’t know the answer to that question himself.

“Look.”  Jake crouched next to him.  “We’re going to need to cut you, okay?  It’s going to hurt, and then it’ll make you sick, and we need to let it work for a while...”  He glanced at Alloran for confirmation; Alloran nodded.  “But after that you can morph, and you’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” Marco said at last, very slowly.

Cassie stepped forward.  Holding the piece of metal gingerly by its dull surfaces, she positioned the broken corner over Marco’s arm, and slashed down.  She opened a long cut across his right bicep.

Marco hissed with pain, pressing a hand over the wound to minimize the blood flow.  “Hope you know what you’re doing.”

Cassie set the chunk of metal down and demorphed.  When she was human again she sat next to Marco on the floor.  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

Blood was still flowing heavily out of Marco’s arm.  He closed his eyes, leaning back against the wall behind him.  “Everyone keeps asking me that,” he whispered.

“You’ll be okay in a little while now.  Soon.”  Cassie leaned in to look closely at Marco’s arm, and winced.

It was turning purple-black around the wound, and the infection was spreading with almost visible speed.  Tobias morphed human as well, staring closely at Marco all the while.

Over the next thirty minutes Marco’s arm swelled steadily.  Twice, he vomited greyish bile into a basin that Jake found for him.  I stood up and walked out of the room.

Alloran was standing in the doorway, watching the proceedings with the kind of patient stillness only an ex-host could muster.  There were a heck of a lot of military people watching him, although he didn’t seem to notice.

Sergeant Grace was standing in the hall as well, but he was the only one not looking at Alloran.  Instead he stared in at where Marco sat hunched in around his injured arm, Cassie and Jake hovering on either side of him, Tobias sitting on the bed to watch him closely.

“I didn’t realize,” Sergeant Grace said softly.

I glanced over; apparently he was talking to me.  “What?”

“I never realized.”  He was still staring into the room.  “They’re just kids.”

“Yeah, well, that’s your problem.”  That came out sounding even colder than I meant it to.  I ran a hand over my hair, my entire body itching with exhaustion.  “Look.  I’m going to use you guys’s phone.  Okay?”

Silently he pulled out his own cell phone and handed it to me.

“Thanks.”

I called Mom first.  I kept the conversation short, just telling her that we’d been delayed dealing with the crash and that we should be home within a few hours.  Then, on impulse, I called Bonnie.  She didn’t pick up—she must have still been at work.  I left her a voicemail, just letting her know I loved her and I’d be by later.

After that I got as far as entering Eva’s number, but not hitting send, before I thought better of it.  Anything I told her would sound better coming directly from Marco.  And anyway there wasn’t necessarily a point in calling her yet, not when I didn’t have answers for her.  In the end, I just snapped the phone shut.

Marco was curled into a ball, jaw clenched with pain, when I stopped in the doorway of the room.  His breathing sounded better, though, less labored.  He was sitting up on his own by now, too.  Then again, his arm was greenish-black from wrist to shoulder.

<That might be enough,> Alloran said at last.

Jake exchanged a glance with Cassie, who shrugged.  They both glanced at Alloran, who made a noncommittal gesture.

“We’re in Middle-of-Nowhere, Nevada,” Marco said, staring at Jake.  “It’s May of 2001.  June Boatwright is president.  My mother’s middle name is Saldana.  Six times eight is forty-eight.  Arnold Schwarzenegger is a terrible actor.  Alyson Hannigan still won’t go on a date with me.  My arm friggin’ hurts, because half an hour ago Cassie sliced me open like a fish, because eight hours ago I learned a valuable lesson about not picking up strange aliens.  I do _not_ want to bite anyone in this room.  Good enough?"

Jake and Cassie looked at each other again, each one clearly hoping the other would decide.

“Yeah, okay,” Jake said.  “Go ahead and morph.”

Marco closed his eyes to concentrate.  The shape of his skull deformed, pushing outward into a long snout even as his ears became pointed and fuzzy.  I thought for a minute he was turning into a wolf, but then it became clear that, for no reason I could discern, he’d opted to turn into the world’s ugliest toy poodle instead.  He shook himself off from curly head to fluffy little tail, pranced in a circle, and then demorphed.

“Please tell me that wasn’t your attempt to turn into a polar bear,” Tobias said dryly.

“Oh, come on.  That was _one time_.”  Marco rolled his eyes.

Sergeant Grace frowned, opening his mouth and turning to look at me.

“Don’t ask,” I advised him.  “Never ask.  Trust me.  You will regret it.  Every single time.”

“How are you?” Jake said.

Marco sighed.  “So unbelievably sick of that question.  But also...”  He frowned, thinking.  “Yeah, I’m good.  I could go for, like, a twelve-hour nap.  But other than that I feel fine.”  He stood up slowly, combing a hand through his hair.

Jake continued to hover next to him, but he did in fact look fine.

“Uh, thanks,” Marco said to Alloran.  “That was... we owe you one.”

<No you don’t.>  With that, Alloran turned and walked out of the base.  One of the soldiers started to say something as he passed, and then decided against it.

I watched through the semi-transparent outer wall of the base as he turned into a kafit bird and flew away.

“Not much for goodbyes, is he?” Tobias commented.

There was a long pause, during which time most of the Air Force people stood around in sheepish silence.

“Let’s go home,” Jake said at last.

“Ugh, amen to that.”  Marco shook himself off again, looking at his wrist as if for evidence of bite marks—either the creature’s or his own.

The four of them walked out of the room and down the hall.  I trailed behind, moving into the space the soldiers all cleared for them as they passed.  We had just reached the front door of the base when—

“General Berenson!”  It was Captain Nasland.

Jake closed his eyes, stopping.  “I never thought I’d actually miss people calling me ‘prince,’” he muttered.  But by the time he turned to face the captain, he had something approaching a polite smile on his face.

“Sir, I just wanted to say...”  Captain Nasland moistened his lips.  He didn’t appear to know what it was he wanted to say.  “It’s just...  Well, the media are going to be here soon, and it really would be for the best if you could make a statement.”

“Really.”  Jake crossed his arms.  “You actually think it would be in your best interests if I told the media what I thought of this whole situation?”

Captain Nasland pulled his shoulders back.  “At times like these, it’s important to present a unified front—”

“You have a dracon cannon in there, right?” I said.

He turned to look at me.  “Excuse me?”

“Okay, fine.  I know you have a dracon cannon in there.”  I jerked my head toward the base.

He frowned.  “Are you suggesting we fire on the media?”

“I can see why that would be tempting, but no,” I said.  “I’m suggesting you take that nice little dracon cannon which you’re definitely not supposed to have according to international law, and you use it to reduce that ship to a couple stray molecules.  Your medic said you’d already confirmed the IDs of the dead people, and their bodies are contaminated anyway.  Disintegrate the ship.”

Captain Nasland’s expression tightened.  “We’ll take that suggestion into consideration.”

“It would make everything a heck of a lot easier to explain—or not—to the media,” Cassie said gently.

He nodded, mouth pursed so tightly it was almost invisible.

“Look,” Tobias said suddenly.

Jake turned.  “What is it?”

They were both staring upwards.  I glanced up as well.

A brilliant blue-white light was streaking across the evening sky, slowing and becoming brighter as it approached.  When it was a hundred feet overhead it resolved itself into an egg-shaped fighter with two stubby little wings and the sharp overhead curve of a tail-like shredder.

Everyone’s hair was standing on end.  Marco especially looked ridiculous, long dark strands floating all around his head.  Tobias was grinning like a loon.

The ship lowered steadily until it touched down in the field in front of us.  Its engines shut off, and everyone’s hair dropped back into place.

“Dude!” Marco called loudly.  “Way to show up late to the party!"

<I know.>

The door of the fighter opened slowly, becoming circular and lowering to the ground.  Ax stepped out almost before it was finished moving.  Completely ignoring Captain Nasland’s sputtered protests, he jumped lightly to the ground and ran over to his fellow Animorphs.

<You’re all safe?> he asked.  <You’re not hurt?>

“Well, not anymore,” Marco said.  “What’d you do, stop for take-out on your way here?”

<I came as soon as I got your message,> Ax said stiffly.  <However, at the time I was in the Cygnus arm of our galaxy and—>

“Yeah, yeah, we missed you too.”  Marco slapped him on the shoulder, and then yanked Ax into a hug.

Ax patted Marco cautiously on the arm, favoring him with one of those weird andalite smiles, before gently extracting himself.  Tobias was standing beyond Marco, expression neutral but with suspicious moisture gathering in his eyes.

They stared at each other for several seconds.  I’m not sure if they said anything in private thought-speak.  Maybe they were just, I don’t know, _communicating_.  In one of those ways that didn’t need words.

“Well.”  I turned to Captain Nasland, sticking out my hand.  “I’d say it’s been nice, but that would be a lie, so.  We won’t say anything if you won’t?”

He shook my hand very, very hard.  He may have cracked a few bones in the process.  “Yes, I believe that may be for the best.”

“Great.”  I took my hand back before he succeeded in pulling it off entirely.  “Bye, then.”

He frowned.  “You won’t need a ride home?”

“I think our ride home just arrived.”  I jerked my head toward the little cluster of Animorphs standing around the door of the andalite fighter.

“Right.”  He nodded once, sharply.  “We’ll be sure to consider your proposal about that ship, son.”

“Great.”

He pivoted very precisely and walked back into the base without looking back.

I walked away as well, leaving the Animorphs to their conversation.  I didn’t make it out of earshot before I heard Cassie sniffle.  “Yeah,” she said, “I wish she was here too.”

Very deliberately I missed whatever it was Tobias said in response.  I kept walking, no destination in mind other than _away_.  No doubt someone would come and get me before they left.  In the meantime, they deserved this moment to themselves.


	11. Epilogue: Lousy Babysitters

Then I heard the faint sound of the front door opening and closing.

Tom was leaving...

"Yeerks make lousy babysitters," I muttered under my breath.

— _The Threat_ , p. 24

 

I lurked away from the andalite fighter for as long as I could come up with an excuse for doing so, watching the faint arcs of light that illuminated the walls of the compound.  The Air Force was destroying the Skrit Na ship.  Several times groups of uniformed men and women jogged outside or ran around the side of the building, many of them talking on cell phones.  Alloran was right: it wouldn’t be long before the press showed up.  I watched it all in silence until Jake shouted, “Dude!  Get your butt over here or we’re leaving without you!”

Whatever they’d been talking about, Tobias was back in bird form and Jake and Cassie were back to being clingy.  I determinedly didn’t ask as I slipped into the andalite flier to join them.  The inside proved to be cool and industrial, with softly backlit photos and a computer display that looked far more ergonomic than anything the yeerks had ever come up with.  It was a little cramped with six of us in there, but I didn’t particularly mind.

Leaning against a far wall, I avoided eye contact with all of them by flipping open the screen of the phone I still held and jotting off a quick text to Eva.

“Where’d you get that?” Jake felt the need to interrupt my conversation.

I shrugged.  “Borrowed it from one of the Army guys.”

It was hilarious to watch out of the corner of my eye as he went through the utterly predictable motions of puffing himself up to correct me about the “Army” thing, deciding it wasn’t worth it, getting indignant that I’d stolen military equipment, deciding _that_ wasn’t worth commenting on either, and settling down to glare at me in huffy silence.

“Who are you texting, anyway?” Marco asked.

“Your mom,” I said.

<Ah!> Ax interjected.  <I am familiar with this form of human humor.  For instance, as the artists The Pharcyde say—>

<Okay, first of all,> Tobias said, < _Why_.  Just... why.  Of all the Earth humor you could possibly...  Ax-man, you’ve been corrupted.  Irreparably.  There’s no hope for you, man. >

“Second, he’s being literal,” Marco said, shuddering theatrically.  He was sitting perched on the edge of a console that I was almost certain wasn’t intended for use as a chair, but Ax hadn’t kicked him off yet so I guess he wasn’t about to crash the ship by sitting on its computer.  “At least, I assume he’s being literal and not an asshole.”

“Both.”  I didn’t look up from the phone screen, tapping away.  “If anyone wants to borrow it after me, let me know.”

“What are you telling her?” Marco asked.

Now I did look up for the first time, narrowing my eyes.  “I _was_ just explaining that I’m definitely going to be late on those progress reports for our baby zombies.”

Marco sighed, slumping back against the computer screen, which ripped into multicolors where his back touched it.  “Good.”

“Does that mean you’re _not_ planning on telling her about the fact you almost died?” I looked him over.

“None of your business.”

“Uh-huh.”  I looked back down at the phone.  “Well, in that case..."

Marco slipped off the console.  He dove forward and made a lunge for the phone, so I just held it over my head out of his reach.

“Give me that!” he snapped.

“I will,” I said.  “If you tell her yourself.”

“Children, settle down,” Jake drawled.  I wasn’t sure who he was accusing of immaturity, given that he was currently eyeing the ship’s gun port like he was itching to try firing it at something.

“I’m sure she won’t overreact.”  I crossed my arms, sandwiching the phone against my body.

“I’m sure she will,” Marco said.

“I won’t tell her anything,” I offered, “if you at the very least give her a quick run-down of what happened.  And search for info on that lotemric thing.”

“He’s right,” Cassie said, smiling apologetically at Marco.  “You should probably make sure there are no side-effects.”

“Just give me the phone,” Marco said.

I looked back down at the phone, flipping it open again.  Bonnie had texted me back, wanting to know what was up.  Marco made another swipe for it, and again I dodged.

“Bite me,” he snapped.

“Ssssssssure.”  When I lifted my head up, Marco scrambled backward with comic speed, eyes improbably wide in his dead-white face.  He was probably reacting to the fact that my tongue had gone long and narrow and forked at the end, or maybe the three-inch fangs that had sprouted out of my incisors.  Then again, it could have been the way my eyes had gone very round and shifted to an unnatural shade of gold, or the sudden disappearance of my nose.

“Holy _shit!_ ”  That was Jake, not Marco, and his voice had gone up three octaves on the second word.

I focused a second, frowning in concentration, and my face went back to its usual gorgeous proportions.

<How did you _do_ that? > Tobias demanded.

“I closed my eyes and thought real hard about being a snake.”  I rolled my eyes. “If you haven’t figured out the basics of morphing by now, there’s nothing I can do to help you.”

Belatedly I realized that all five of them were staring at me in surprise.

“Told you he was an estreen,” Cassie said smugly, nudging Marco.

“What?” I said, laughing.  “I’m not an _estreen_.  I just...”

“Uh, dude?” Jake said.  “No one else here could do that thing you just did with only morphing one body part at a time.  Well, Cassie could, but—”

“But she doesn’t use her powers for  _evil_ ,” Marco muttered.  A small, not-very-nice part of me was delighted to note he still looked shaken. 

“How’d you figure it out?” Jake asked Cassie.

“Earlier, when you sent that message.”  She glanced at both Tobias and Jake.  “It hit Tom just as hard as it hit me, but Marco was fine.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but—”

“You do have a really good track record of keeping control of morphs.”  Jake was staring at me as if seeing me for the first time.

I looked down, wincing.  “You didn’t see me almost eat that lady who shot you.”

“But that was the first time you’ve _ever_ lost control.”  Jake frowned.  “Isn’t it?”

“I guess, but...”

“Earlier with the cockroaches,” Cassie said.  “You had no trouble at all with that morph."

I stiffened.  “Neither did any of you.”

<We’ve all used that morph dozens of times,> Tobias said.

“The first time I went roach, I spent half an hour running around in circles freaking out, and ended up stuck in one of Mom’s Roach Motels behind the refrigerator,” Jake admitted.

“You morphed inside the house?” I asked.

Jake shrugged.  “I hid under the dining room table?”

“Was I in the house at the time?” I demanded.

“I don’t think so—”

“You don’t _think_?  And, what, you assumed that I’d be totally incapable of seeing anything below eye level?  The dining room table?   _Seriously_?  Were you _trying_ to get yourself killed?”

“It was a long time ago,” Jake said.

“ _So_?”

“So shut up.  We’ve all done stupid things with morphing.”  Marco glared at me.  “Nobody died, so untwist your panties.”

<Have you ever morphed partway into another animal without completely demorphing from the first one?> Tobias asked me.

I gritted my teeth.  Apparently my attempt to talk about more important things than this stupid nonsense wasn’t going to deter them.  “Um, once, I guess.”

“Yep.”  Cassie looked entirely too pleased with herself.  “Estreen.”

“Look,” I said loudly.  “It was a life-or-death situation.  I was falling out of the sky at the time, and I don’t even know how I did it.  I’m sure any of you would do the same in those circumstances.”

<No.>  Ax cocked a stalk eye at me, the other three still focused on driving the ship.  <There have been many times in the past when our lives have depended on our ability to transition as quickly as possible between morphs.  None of us have succeeded in starting another morph before the first was completely finished... Except Cassie.>

“Falling out of the sky?” Jake asked.

I looked down, hopefully not blushing.  “I, uh, fell out of the Blade ship, okay?  Also on my list of stupid morphing mistakes.”

“Well, that explains it.”  Marco snorted loudly.  “We straight-up thought you were dead for, like, two days there, because we figured falling from that height you had better odds than not of coming up all pancake—”

Jake flinched.

Marco shut up.

“ _Anyway_ , that doesn’t mean anything.  You’re all...” I looked around at them, huffing a laugh.  “You’re all so much faster, more skilled, just _better_ at this whole morphing thing than I am.  Just because I accidentally figured out a few tricks, that doesn’t mean...”

“We’ve had practice,” Jake said.  “Literally hundreds of times as much practice as you have.  There was a time there where we’d be averaging three or four morphs a day, every day, for _years_.  We all started out much slower, and we had way more difficulty controlling new morphs than you have.”

I frowned, thinking suddenly of last fall, of standing in Paul Edgecombe’s backyard.  I’d started morphing almost a full minute after Margaret had—and I’d finished _before_ her, already a snake and out of sight by the time she was fully leopard.

<Congratulations,> Tobias said.  <You’re an—>

“I am _not_ an estreen!” I snapped.

There was a long, awkward pause.  Six pairs of eyes stared at me in shock.

“I...”  I dragged a hand over my face, feeling every ounce of exhaustion I’d acquired over the last twelve hours.  “I’m not some nature-loving mystically-connected...”  I offered Cassie an apologetic smile.  “I’m not some crazy super-dedicated morpher.”

“I beg your pardon?”  Marco pressed a hand over his chest.  “I am offended, no I am _appalled_. That you would think Cassie is our resident crazy person who gets _way_ too into morphing when my dear friend Tobias is right here in the room?  If anyone is a crazy super-dedicated morpher, it is the guy who lives in a tree and eats rats, and I will not stand for him being upstaged—nay, for him being _overlooked_ —in this fashion.”

<Gee, thanks, Marco,> Tobias drawled.  <So kind.>

“Anyway, he’s got a point,” Jake said.  “It doesn’t have to do with liking animals or with personality at all.  It’s...”  He glanced at Ax for help.

<There is a spectrum of different abilities in morphing—‘estreen’ is simply a term for those who are very high in skill level,> Ax said.

“So it’s a made-up category?” I said quickly.

<There are noticeable differences in morphing skill, though.>  I couldn’t tell for sure, but his expression appeared disapproving.  <Prince Jake is correct, that those differences have very little to do with personality and are primarily genetic in origin.>

“Well, there you go.”  I held out my hands to Jake.  “If it’s genetic, how come you don’t have it, huh?  How come Rachel never—?”  I cut myself off.  “Point is, I’m not.  I can’t be.”

<Primarily genetic,> Ax said.  <Not entirely.  As with all traits, there are gene-environment interactions that account for most of the observable variance.  And siblings are not genetically identical.>

“Yeah, but...”  I shut my mouth, not sure where else to go.

“Why are you so opposed to this, anyway?”  Marco was frowning thoughtfully at me.  “It’s a good thing, man.  I’d give my left nut to morph like Cassie does.”

<Thank you for _that_ mental image,> Tobias said.

“Because don’t you think I’d know by now?” I said.  “This is my freaking...”  I indicated my own body.

Marco raised his eyebrows.  “Yeah, and you're good at morphing.  Suck it up, buttercup."

“I...”  I pressed my lips together, looking away from all of them out the viewport.  It wasn’t the kind of thing that I particularly felt like explaining to any of them.

It was just... I'd been the first morph-capable human-controller.  The first.  And maybe that'd been partially an accident and partially a matter of the yeerks using me as a human shield against Jake, and yet... What if they'd known something I hadn't?  What if people could tell, just by looking at me, how useful I was?  How easy it'd be to take this body from me and turn it into a weapon?  After all, that was what they'd done.

And then, every time I thought I got a handle on this morphing crap... Well, it always turned out I didn’t.  I was really sick to death of being discussed like a piece of meat, even though I knew that wasn’t how they meant it.

I dragged a hand over my hair, pressing on my scalp like I could actually massage my brain that way.  “Next you’re all going to be telling me I’m the long-lost princess of Russia,” I said, trying to lighten my own mood.  “And the worst part is, I’ll probably believe you."

“Would that make me royalty too?” Jake asked quickly.

“There can be only one Tsarina Anastasia Romanova, and Tom just called dibs on being her,” Marco said.  “But don’t worry, I still like you better.   _You_ wouldn’t be nearly this whiny about it if you were an es—”

“Let’s just agree to disagree about the estreen thing, okay?” I didn’t have the necessary brain power to deal with this conversation right now.

“Yeah,” Cassie said gently.  “Yeah, okay.”

“So.”  Marco clapped his hands.  “Burgers?  My treat.”

I gave him a tiny, grateful smile.

<How are you going to treat us to burgers?> Tobias asked.  <You don’t have any money.>

“No,” Jake groaned.  “No, you are not pulling the napkin trick again.”

Marco puffed out his chest.

<I think we should eat hamburgers,> Ax said brightly.  <Especially if we can find a venue that allows for indefinite dispensation of mustard at no extra cost!>

<Ax-man, I’ll buy you your own bottle of mustard, but we are not getting kicked out of _another_ Burger King for drinking condiments,> Tobias said.  <What’s the napkin trick?>

“Marco autographs a napkin and offers to let the store keep it in exchange for a free meal.”  Jake rolled his eyes.

“Dude, they can sell those things for over four thousand dollars on the internet,” Marco said.  “Way more than the price of a few measly burgers.  Everyone wins.”

“And the fact that it’s tacky and pretentious?” Jake raised an eyebrow.

“All part of my charm.”  Marco grinned, unrepentant.

“Can something be tacky _and_ pretentious at the same time?” Cassie wondered.

— _send help_ , I texted Bonnie.  — _i’m surrounded by crazy hooligans._

— _don’t worry.  i’m on my way.  where r u?_

_—just follow the news reports of an andalite fighter making an unauthorized landing in the middle of a burger king parking lot, and there i’ll be._

_—WHAT?!?_

_—long story.  i cannot wait to tell you._


End file.
